Title: The Imperialist
Author: Duncan, Sara Jeannette
Language: English
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THE IMPERIALIST


By Sara Jeannette Duncan, 1861-1922 (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)


1904



CHAPTER I

It would have been idle to inquire into the antecedents, or even the
circumstances, of old Mother Beggarlegs. She would never tell; the
children, at all events, were convinced of that; and it was only the
children, perhaps, who had the time and the inclination to speculate.
Her occupation was clear; she presided like a venerable stooping hawk,
over a stall in the covered part of the Elgin market-place, where she
sold gingerbread horses and large round gingerbread cookies, and brown
sticky squares of what was known in all circles in Elgin as taffy. She
came, it was understood, with the dawn; with the night she vanished,
spending the interval on a not improbable broomstick. Her gingerbread
was better than anybody’s; but there was no comfort in standing, first
on one foot and then on the other, while you made up your mind--the
horses were spirited and you could eat them a leg at a time, but there
was more in the cookies--she bent such a look on you, so fierce and
intolerant of vacillation. She belonged to the group of odd characters,
rarer now than they used to be, etched upon the vague consciousness of
small towns as in a way mysterious and uncanny; some said that Mother
Beggarlegs was connected with the aristocracy and some that she had been
“let off” being hanged. The alternative was allowed full swing, but in
any case it was clear that such persons contributed little to the common
good and, being reticent, were not entertaining. So you bought your
gingerbread, concealing, as it were, your weapons, paying your copper
coins with a neutral nervous eye, and made off to a safe distance,
whence you turned to shout insultingly, if you were an untrounced young
male of Elgin, “Old Mother Beggarlegs! Old Mother Beggarlegs!” And why
“Beggarlegs” nobody in the world could tell you. It might have been
a dateless waggery, or it might have been a corruption of some more
dignified surname, but it was all she ever got. Serious, meticulous
persons called her “Mrs” Beggarlegs, slightly lowering their voices and
slurring it, however, it must be admitted. The name invested her with
a graceless, anatomical interest, it penetrated her wizened black and
derisively exposed her; her name went far indeed to make her dramatic.
Lorne Murchison, when he was quite a little boy was affected by this
and by the unfairness of the way it singled her out. Moved partly by
the oppression of the feeling and partly by a desire for information
he asked her sociably one day, in the act of purchase, why the gilt was
generally off her gingerbread. He had been looking long, as a matter
of fact, for gingerbread with the gilt on it, being accustomed to the
phrase on the lips of his father in connection with small profits.
Mother Beggarlegs, so unaccustomed to politeness that she could not
instantly recognize it, answered him with an imprecation at which he,
no doubt, retreated, suddenly thrown on the defensive hurling the usual
taunt. One prefers to hope he didn’t, with the invincible optimism one
has for the behaviour of lovable people; but whether or not his kind
attempt at colloquy is the first indication I can find of that active
sympathy with the disabilities of his fellow-beings which stamped him
later so intelligent a meliorist. Even in his boy’s beginning he had a
heart for the work; and Mother Beggarlegs, but for a hasty conclusion,
might have made him a friend.

It is hard to invest Mother Beggarlegs with importance, but the date
helps me--the date I mean, of this chapter about Elgin; she was a person
to be reckoned with on the twenty-fourth of May. I will say at once, for
the reminder to persons living in England that the twenty-fourth of May
was the Queen’s Birthday. Nobody in Elgin can possibly have forgotten
it. The Elgin children had a rhyme about it--

   The twenty-fourth of May
      Is the Queen’s Birthday;
   If you don’t give us a holiday,
      We’ll all run away.

But Elgin was in Canada. In Canada the twenty-fourth of May WAS the
Queen’s Birthday; and these were times and regions far removed from the
prescription that the anniversary “should be observed” on any of those
various outlying dates which by now, must have produced in her immediate
people such indecision as to the date upon which Her Majesty really
did come into the world. That day, and that only, was the observed, the
celebrated, a day with an essence in it, dawning more gloriously than
other days and ending more regretfully, unless, indeed, it fell on a
Sunday when it was “kept” on the Monday, with a slightly clouded feeling
that it wasn’t exactly the same thing. Travelled persons, who had spent
the anniversary there, were apt to come back with a poor opinion of
its celebration in “the old country”--a pleasant relish to the
more-than-ever appreciated advantages of the new, the advantages
that came out so by contrast. More space such persons indicated, more
enterprise they boasted, and even more loyalty they would flourish,
all with an affectionate reminiscent smile at the little ways of a
grandmother. A “Bank” holiday, indeed! Here it was a real holiday, that
woke you with bells and cannon--who has forgotten the time the ancient
piece of ordnance in “the Square” blew out all the windows in the
Methodist church?--and went on with squibs and crackers till you didn’t
know where to step on the sidewalks, and ended up splendidly with
rockets and fire-balloons and drunken Indians vociferous on their way to
the lock-up. Such a day for the hotels, with teams hitched three abreast
in front of their aromatic barrooms; such a day for the circus, with
half the farmers of Fox County agape before the posters--with all their
chic and shock they cannot produce such posters nowadays, nor are there
any vacant lots to form attractive backgrounds--such a day for Mother
Beggarlegs! The hotels, and the shops and stalls for eating and
drinking, were the only places in which business was done; the public
sentiment put universal shutters up, but the public appetite insisted
upon excepting the means to carnival. An air of ceremonial festivity
those fastened shutters gave; the sunny little town sat round them,
important and significant, and nobody was ever known to forget that they
were up, and go on a fool’s errand. No doubt they had an impressiveness
for the young countryfolk that strolled up and down Main Street in their
honest best, turning into Snow’s for ice-cream when a youth was disposed
to treat. (Gallantry exacted ten-cent dishes, but for young ladies
alone, or family parties, Mrs Snow would bring five-cent quantities
almost without asking, and for very small boys one dish and the
requisite number of spoons.) There was discrimination, there was choice,
in this matter of treating. A happy excitement accompanied it, which you
could read in the way Corydon clapped his soft felt hat on his head as
he pocketed the change. To be treated--to ten-cent dishes--three times
in the course of the day by the same young man gave matter for private
reflection and for public entertainment, expressed in the broad grins of
less reckless people. I speak of a soft felt hat, but it might be more
than that: it might be a dark green one, with a feather in it; and here
was distinction, for such a hat indicated that its owner belonged to the
Independent Order of Foresters, who Would leave their spring wheat for
forty miles round to meet in Elgin and march in procession, wearing
their hats, and dazzlingly scatter upon Main Street. They gave the day
its touch of imagination, those green cocked hats; they were lyrical
upon the highways; along the prosaic sidewalks by twos and threes they
sang together. It is no great thing, a hat of any quality; but a small
thing may ring dramatic on the right metal, and in the vivid idea of
Lorne Murchison and his sister Advena a Robin Hood walked in every
Independent Forester, especially in the procession. Which shows the
risks you run if you, a person of honest livelihood and solicited vote,
adopt any portion of a habit not familiar to you, and go marching about
with a banner and a band. Two children may be standing at the first
street corner, to whom your respectability and your property may at once
become illusion and your outlawry the delightful fact.

A cheap trip brought the Order of Green Hats to Elgin; and there were
cheap trips on this great day to persuade other persons to leave it. The
Grand Trunk had even then an idea of encouraging social combination for
change of scene, and it was quite a common thing for the operatives of
the Milburn Boiler Company to arrange to get themselves carried to the
lakeside or “the Falls” at half a dollar a head. The “hands” got it up
themselves and it was a question in Elgin whether one might sink one’s
dignity and go as a hand for the sake of the fifty-cent opportunity,
a question usually decided in the negative. The social distinctions of
Elgin may not be easily appreciated by people accustomed to the rough
and ready standards of a world at the other end of the Grand Trunk; but
it will be clear at a glance that nobody whose occupation prescribed a
clean face could be expected to travel cheek by jowl, as a privilege,
with persons who were habitually seen with smutty ones, barefaced smut,
streaming out at the polite afternoon hour of six, jangling an empty
dinner pail. So much we may decide, and leave it, reflecting as we go
how simple and satisfactory, after all, are the prejudices which can
hold up such obvious justification. There was recently to be pointed
out in England the heir to a dukedom who loved stoking, and got his
face smutty by preference. He would have been deplorably subversive of
accepted conventions in Elgin; but, happily or otherwise, such persons
and such places have at present little more than an imaginative
acquaintance, vaguely cordial on the one side, vaguely critical on the
other, and of no importance in the sum.

Polite society, to return to it, preferred the alternative of staying
at home and mowing the lawn or drinking raspberry vinegar on its own
beflagged verandah; looking forward in the afternoon to the lacrosse
match. There was nearly always a lacrosse match on the Queen’s Birthday,
and it was the part of elegance to attend and encourage the home team,
as well as that of small boys, with broken straw hats, who sneaked an
entrance, and were more enthusiastic than anyone. It was “a quarter” to
get in, so the spectators were naturally composed of persons who could
afford the quarter, and persons like the young Flannigans and Finnigans,
who absolutely couldn’t, but who had to be there all the same. Lorne and
Advena Murchison never had the quarter, so they witnessed few lacrosse
matches, though they seldom failed to refresh themselves by a sight
of the players after the game when, crimson and perspiring, but still
glorious in striped jerseys, their lacrosses and running shoes slung
over one shoulder, these heroes left the field.

The Birthday I am thinking of, with Mrs Murchison as a central figure in
the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner, there was a lacrosse match of
some importance for the Fox County Championship and the Fox County Cup
as presented by the Member for the South Riding. Mrs Murchison remains
the central figure, nevertheless, with her family radiating from her,
gathered to help or to hinder in one of those domestic crises which
arose when the Murchisons were temporarily deprived of a “girl.”
 Everybody was subject to them in Elgin, everybody had to acknowledge and
face them. Let a new mill be opened, and it didn’t matter what you paid
her or how comfortable you made her, off she would go, and you might
think yourself lucky if she gave a week’s warning. Hard times shut down
the mills and brought her back again; but periods of prosperity were
very apt to find the ladies of Elgin where I am compelled to introduce
Mrs Murchison--in the kitchen. “You’d better get up--the girl’s gone,”
 Lorne had stuck his head into his sister’s room to announce, while
yet the bells were ringing and the rifles of the local volunteers were
spitting out the feu de joie. “I’ve lit the fire an’ swep’ out the
dining-room. You tell mother. Queen’s Birthday, too--I guess Lobelia’s
about as mean as they’re made!” And the Murchisons had descended to face
the situation. Lorne had by then done his part, and gone out into the
chromatic possibilities of the day; but the sense of injury he had
communicated to Advena in her bed remained and expanded. Lobelia, it was
felt, had scurvily manipulated the situation--her situation, it might
have been put, if any Murchison had been in the temper for jesting.
She had taken unjustifiable means to do a more unjustifiable thing,
to secure for herself an improper and unlawful share of the day’s
excitements, transferring her work, by the force of circumstances, to
the shoulders of other people since, as Mrs Murchison remarked, somebody
had to do it. Nor had she her mistress testified the excuse of fearing
unreasonable confinement. “I told her she might go when she had done her
dishes after dinner,” said Mrs Murchison, “and then she had only to come
back at six and get tea--what’s getting tea? I advised her to finish her
ironing yesterday, so as to be free of it today; and she said she would
be very glad to. Now, I wonder if she DID finish it!” and Mrs Murchison
put down her pan of potatoes with a thump to look in the family clothes
basket. “Not she! Five shirts and ALL the coloured things. I call it
downright deceit!”

“I believe I know the reason she’ll SAY,” said Advena. “She objects to
rag carpet in her bedroom. She told me so.”

“Rag carpet--upon my word!” Mrs Murchison dropped her knife to exclaim.
“It’s what her betters have to do with! I’ve known the day when that
very piece of rag carpet--sixty balls there were in it and every one I
sewed with my own fingers--was the best I had for my spare room, with
a bit of ingrain in the middle. Dear me!” she went on with a smile that
lightened the whole situation, “how proud I was of that performance! She
didn’t tell ME she objected to rag carpet!”

“No, Mother,” Advena agreed, “she knew better.”

They were all there in the kitchen, supporting their mother, and it
seems an opportunity to name them. Advena, the eldest, stood by the long
kitchen table washing the breakfast cups in “soft” soap and hot water.
The soft soap--Mrs Murchison had a barrelful boiled every spring in
the back yard, an old colonial economy she hated to resign--made a
fascinating brown lather with iridescent bubbles. Advena poured cupfuls
of it from on high to see the foam rise, till her mother told her for
mercy’s sake to get on with those dishes. She stood before a long low
window, looking out into the garden and the light, filtering through
apple branches on her face showed her strongly featured and intelligent
for fourteen. Advena was named after one grandmother; when the next
girl came Mrs Murchison, to make an end of the matter, named it Abigail,
after the other. She thought both names outlandish and acted under
protest, but hoped that now everybody would be satisfied. Lorne came
after Advena, at the period of a naive fashion of christening the young
sons of Canada in the name of her Governor-General. It was a simple
way of attesting a loyal spirit, but with Mrs Murchison more particular
motives operated. The Marquis of Lorne was not only the deputy of the
throne, he was the son-in-law of a good woman of whom Mrs Murchison
thought more, and often said it, for being the woman she was than for
being twenty times a Queen; and he had made a metrical translation of
the Psalms, several of which were included in the revised psalter for
the use of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, from which the whole
of Knox Church sang to the praise of God every Sunday. These were
circumstances that weighed with Mrs Murchison, and she called her son
after the Royal representative, feeling that she was doing well for him
in a sense beyond the mere bestowal of a distinguished and a euphonious
name, though that, as she would have willingly acknowledged, was “well
enough in its place.”

We must take this matter of names seriously; the Murchisons always did.
Indeed, from the arrival of a new baby until the important Sunday of
the christening, nothing was discussed with such eager zest and such
sustained interest as the name he should get--there was a fascinating
list at the back of the dictionary--and to the last minute it was
problematical. In Stella’s case, Mrs Murchison actually changed her mind
on the way to church; and Abby, who had sat through the sermon
expecting Dorothy Maud, which she thought lovely, publicly cried with
disappointment. Stella was the youngest, and Mrs Murchison was thankful
to have a girl at last whom she could name without regard to her own
relations or anybody else’s. I have skipped about a good deal, but I
have only left out two, the boys who came between Abby and Stella. In
their names the contemporary observer need not be too acute to discover
both an avowal and to some extent an enforcement of Mr Murchison’s
political views; neither an Alexander Mackenzie nor an Oliver Mowat
could very well grow up into anything but a sound Liberal in that part
of the world without feeling himself an unendurable paradox. To christen
a baby like that was, in a manner, a challenge to public attention; the
faint relaxation about the lips of Dr Drummond--the best of the
Liberals himself, though he made a great show of keeping it out of
the pulpit--recognized this, and the just perceptible stir of the
congregation proved it. Sonorously he said it. “Oliver Mowat, I baptize
thee in the Name of the Father--” The compliment should have all the
impressiveness the rite could give it, while the Murchison brothers and
sisters, a-row in the family pew, stood on one foot with excitement as
to how Oliver Mowat would take the drops that defined him. The verdict
was, on the way home, that he behaved splendidly. Alexander Mackenzie,
the year before, had roared.

He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously,
behind the woodpile. His father had finally cuffed him for importunity;
and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but
his rights. Only the woodpile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood
inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances;
and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till,
observing them, he began to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a
pond there, and was presently disappointed to find the source exhausted.
The Murchisons were all imaginative.

The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still “tormented.” Poor Alec’s
rights--to a present of pocket-money on the Queen’s Birthday--were
common ones, and almost statutory. How their father, sitting comfortably
with his pipe in the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin,
reading the Toronto paper, could evade his liability in the matter was
unfathomable to the Murchisons; it was certainly illiberal; they had a
feeling that it was illegal. A little teasing was generally necessary,
but the resistance today had begun to look ominous and Alec, as we know,
too temerarious, had retired in disorder to the woodpile.

Oliver was wiping Advena’s dishes. He exercised himself ostentatiously
upon a plate, standing in the door to be within earshot of his father.

“Eph Wheeler,” he informed his family, “Eph Wheeler, he’s got
twenty-five cents, an’ a English sixpence, an’ a Yankee nickel. An’ Mr
Wheeler’s only a common working man, a lot poorer’n we are.”

Mr Murchison removed his pipe from his lips in order, apparently, to
follow unimpeded the trend of the Dominion’s leading article. Oliver
eyed him anxiously. “Do, Father,” he continued in logical sequence. “Aw
do.”

“Make him, Mother,” said Abby indignantly. “It’s the Queen’s BIRTHDAY!”

“Time enough when the butter bill’s paid,” said Mrs Murchison.

“Oh the BUTTER bill! Say, Father, aren’t you going to?”

“What?” asked John Murchison, and again took out his pipe, as if this
were the first he had heard of the matter.

“Give us our fifteen cents each to celebrate with. You can’t do it under
that,” Oliver added firmly. “Crackers are eight cents a packet this
year, the small size.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr Murchison. The reply was definite and final, and its
ambiguity was merely due to the fact that their father disliked giving
a plump refusal. “Nonsense” was easier to say, if not to hear than “No.”
 Oliver considered for a moment, drew Abby to colloquy by the pump, and
sought his brother behind the woodpile. Then he returned to the charge.

“Look here, Father,” he said, “CASH DOWN, we’ll take ten.”

John Murchison was a man of few words, but they were usually impregnated
with meaning, especially in anger. “No more of this,” he said.
“Celebrate fiddlesticks! Go and make yourselves of some use. You’ll get
nothing from me, for I haven’t got it.” So saying, he went through the
kitchen with a step that forbade him to be followed. His eldest son,
arriving over the backyard fence in a state of heat, was just in time
to hear him. Lorne’s apprehension of the situation was instant, and his
face fell, but the depression plainly covered such splendid spirits that
his brother asked resentfully, “Well, what’s the matter with YOU?”

“Matter? Oh, not much. I’m going to see the Cayugas beat the Wanderers,
that’s all; an’ Abe Mackinnon’s mother said he could ask me to come back
to tea with them. Can I, Mother?”

“There’s no objection that I know of,” said Mrs Murchison, shaking her
apron free of stray potato-parings, “but you won’t get money for the
lacrosse match or anything else from your father today, _I_ can assure
you. They didn’t do five dollars worth of business at the store all day
yesterday, and he’s as cross as two sticks.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Lorne jingled his pocket and Oliver took
a fascinated step toward him. “I made thirty cents this morning,
delivering papers for Fisher. His boy’s sick. I did the North Ward--took
me over’n hour. Guess I can go all right, can’t I?”

“Why, yes, I suppose you can,” said his mother. The others were dumb.
Oliver hunched his shoulders and kicked at the nearest thing that had
paint on it. Abby clung to the pump handle and sobbed aloud. Lorne
looked gloomily about him and went out. Making once more for the back
fence, he encountered Alexander in the recognized family retreat. “Oh,
my goodness!” he said, and stopped. In a very few minutes he was back
in the kitchen, followed sheepishly by Alexander, whose grimy face
expressed the hope that beat behind his little waistcoat.

“Say, you kids,” he announced, “Alec’s got four cents, an’ he says he’ll
join up. This family’s going to celebrate all right. Come on down town.”

No one could say that the Murchisons were demonstrative. They said
nothing, but they got their hats. Mrs Murchison looked up from her
occupation.

“Alec,” she said, “out of this house you don’t go till you’ve washed
your face. Lorne, come here,” she added in a lower voice, producing a
bunch of keys. “If you look in the right-hand corner of the top small
drawer in my bureau you’ll find about twenty cents. Say nothing about
it, and mind you don’t meddle with anything else. I guess the Queen
isn’t going to owe it all to you.”



CHAPTER II

“We’ve seen changes, Mr Murchison. Aye. We’ve seen changes.”

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door, over
which the sign “John Murchison: Hardware,” had explained thirty years of
varying commercial fortune. They had pretty well begun life together in
Elgin. John Murchison was one of those who had listened to Mr Drummond’s
trial sermon, and had given his vote to “call” him to the charge. Since
then there had been few Sundays when, morning and evening, Mr Murchison
had not been in his place at the top of his pew, where his dignified
and intelligent head appeared with the isolated significance of a strong
individuality. People looked twice at John Murchison in a crowd; so did
his own children at home. Hearing some discussion of the selection of a
premier, Alec, looking earnestly at him once said, “Why don’t they tell
Father to be it?” The young minister looked twice at him that morning
of the trial sermon, and asked afterward who he was. A Scotchman, Mr
Drummond was told, not very long from the old country, who had bought
the Playfair business on Main Street, and settled in the “Plummer
Place,” which already had a quarter of a century’s standing in the
annals of the town. The Playfair business was a respectable business to
buy; the Plummer Place, though it stood in an unfashionable outskirt,
was a respectable place to settle in; and the minister, in casting his
lot in Elgin, envisaged John Murchison as part of it, thought of him
confidently as a “dependance,” saw him among the future elders and
office-bearers of the congregation, a man who would be punctual with his
pew-rent, sage in his judgements, and whose views upon church attendance
would be extended to his family.

So the two came, contemporaries, to add their labour and their lives
to the building of this little outpost of Empire. It was the frankest
transfer, without thought of return; they were there to spend and be
spent within the circumference of the spot they had chosen, with no
ambition beyond. In the course of nature, even their bones and their
memories would enter into the fabric. The new country filled their eyes;
the new town was their opportunity, its destiny their fate. They were
altogether occupied with its affairs, and the affairs of the growing
Dominion, yet obscure in the heart of each of them ran the undercurrent
of the old allegiance. They had gone the length of their tether, but the
tether was always there. Thus, before a congregation that always stood
in the early days, had the minister every Sunday morning for thirty
years besought the Almighty, with ardour and humility, on behalf of the
Royal Family. It came in the long prayer, about the middle. Not in the
perfunctory words of a ritual, but in the language of his choice, which
varied according to what he believed to be the spiritual needs of the
reigning House, and was at one period, touching certain of its members,
though respectful, extremely candid. The General Assembly of the Church
of Scotland, “now in session,” also--was it ever forgotten once? And
even the Prime Minister, “and those who sit in council with him,” with
just a hint of extra commendation if it happened to be Mr Gladstone. The
minister of Knox Church, Elgin, Ontario, Canada, kept his eye on them
all. Remote as he was, and concerned with affairs of which they could
know little, his sphere of duty could never revolve too far westward to
embrace them, nor could his influence, under any circumstances, cease
to be at their disposal. It was noted by some that after Mr Drummond had
got his D.D. from an American University he also prayed occasionally
for the President of the neighbouring republic; but this was rebutted
by others, who pointed out that it happened only on the occurrence of
assassinations, and held it reasonable enough. The cavillers mostly
belonged to the congregation of St Andrew’s, “Established”--a glum,
old-fashioned lot indeed--who now and then dropped in of a Sunday
evening to hear Mr Drummond preach. (There wasn’t much to be said for
the preaching at St Andrew’s.) The Established folk went on calling the
minister of Knox Church “Mr” Drummond long after he was “Doctor” to his
own congregation, on account of what they chose to consider the dubious
source of the dignity; but the Knox Church people had their own theory
to explain this hypercriticism, and would promptly turn the conversation
to the merits of the sermon.

Twenty-five years it was, in point, this Monday morning when the
Doctor--not being Established we need not hesitate, besides by this time
nobody did--stood with Mr Murchison in the store door and talked about
having seen changes. He had preached his anniversary sermon the night
before to a full church when, laying his hand upon his people’s
heart, he had himself to repress tears. He was aware of another
strand completed in their mutual bond: the sermon had been a moral,
an emotional, and an oratorical success; and in the expansion of the
following morning Dr Drummond had remembered that he had promised his
housekeeper a new gas cooking-range, and that it was high time he should
drop into Murchison’s to inquire about it. Mrs Forsyth had mentioned at
breakfast that they had ranges with exactly the improvement she wanted
at Thompson’s, but the minister was deaf to the hint. Thompson was a
Congregationalist and, improvement or no improvement, it wasn’t likely
that Dr Drummond was going “outside the congregation” for anything he
required. It would have been on a par with a wandering tendency in his
flock, upon which he systematically frowned. He was as great an autocrat
in this as the rector of any country parish in England undermined by
Dissent; but his sense of obligation worked unfailingly both ways.

John Murchison had not said much about the sermon; it wasn’t his way,
and Dr Drummond knew it. “You gave us a good sermon last night, Doctor”;
not much more than that, and “I noticed the Milburns there; we don’t
often get Episcopalians”; and again, “The Wilcoxes”--Thomas Wilcox,
wholesale grocer, was the chief prop of St Andrew’s--“were sitting just
in front of us. We overtook them going home, and Wilcox explained how
much they liked the music. ‘Glad to see you,’ I said. ‘Glad to see you
for any reason,’” Mr Murchison’s eye twinkled. “But they had a
great deal to say about ‘the music.’” It was not an effusive form of
felicitation; the minister would have liked it less if it had been,
felt less justified, perhaps, in remembering about the range on that
particular morning. As it was, he was able to take it with perfect
dignity and good humour, and to enjoy the point against the Wilcoxes
with that laugh of his that did everybody good to hear; so hearty it
was, so rich in the grain of the voice, so full of the zest and flavour
of the joke. The range had been selected, and their talk of changes had
begun with it, Mr Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler and
Dr Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that burned wood and
stood on its four legs, with nothing behind but the stove pipe, and if
you wanted a boiler you took off the front lids and put it on, and how
remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from the conservative
kitchen notions of the old country. He had come, unhappily, a widower
to the domestic improvements on the other side of the Atlantic. “Often
I used to think,” he said to Mr Murchison, “if my poor wife could have
seen that stove how delighted she would have been! But I doubt this
would have been too much for her altogether!”

“That stove!” answered Mr Murchison. “Well I remember it. I sold it
myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart, for thirty dollars--the last
purchase he ever made, poor man. It was great business for me--I
had only two others in the store like it. One of them old Milburn
bought--the father of this man, d’ye mind him?--the other stayed by me a
matter of seven years. I carried a light stock in those days.”

It was no longer a light stock. The two men involuntarily glanced round
them for the satisfaction of the contrast Murchison evoked, though
neither of them, from motives of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell
upon it. John Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial
success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation toward
the prosperity of a member had in some degree the embarrassment of a
tax-gatherer’s. The stock was indeed heavy now. You had to go upstairs
to see the ranges, where they stood in rows, and every one of them
bore somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison’s name.
Through the windows came the iterating ring on the iron from the foundry
in Chestnut Street which fed the shop, with an overflow that found its
way from one end of the country to the other. Finicking visitors to
Elgin found this wearing, but to John Murchison it was the music that
honours the conqueror of circumstances. The ground floor was given up
to the small wares of the business, chiefly imported; two or three
young men, steady and knowledgeable-looking, moved about in their shirt
sleeves among shelves and packing-cases. One of them was our friend
Alec; our other friend Oliver looked after the books at the foundry.
Their father did everything deliberately; but presently, in his own good
time, his commercial letter paper would be headed, with regard to these
two, “John Murchison and Sons.” It had long announced that the business
was “Wholesale and Retail.”

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison, considering the changes in Elgin from the
store door, did it at their leisure, the merchant with his thumbs thrust
comfortably in the armholes of his waistcoat, the minister, with that
familiar trick of his, balancing on one foot and suddenly throwing his
slight weight forward on the other. “A bundle of nerves,” people called
the Doctor: to stand still would have been a penance to him; even as
he swayed backward and forward in talking, his hand must be busy at the
seals on his watch chain and his shrewd glance travelling over a dozen
things you would never dream so clever a man would take notice of. It
was a prospect of moderate commercial activity they looked out upon,
a street of mellow shopfronts on both sides, of varying height and
importance, wearing that air of marking a period, a definite stop
in growth, that so often coexists with quite a reasonable degree of
activity and independence in colonial towns. One could almost say,
standing there in the door at Murchison’s, where the line of legitimate
enterprise had been overpassed and where its intention had been none
too sanguine--on the one hand in the faded, and pretentious red brick
building with the false third storey, occupied by Cleary which must have
been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything else; on the other hand
in the solid “Gregory block,” opposite the market, where rents were as
certain as the dividends of the Bank of British North America.

Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of growing and
doing business, it had always found the days long enough. Drays passed
through it to the Grand Trunk station, but they passed one at a time; a
certain number of people went up and down about their affairs, but they
were never in a hurry; a street car jogged by every ten minutes or so,
but nobody ran after it. There was a decent procedure; and it was felt
that Bofield--he was dry-goods, too--in putting in an elevator was just
a little unnecessarily in advance of the times. Bofield had only two
storeys, like everybody else, and a very easy staircase, up which people
often declared they preferred to walk rather than wait in the elevator
for a young man to finish serving and work it. These, of course, were
the sophisticated people of Elgin; countryfolk, on a market day, would
wait a quarter of an hour for the young man and think nothing of it;
and I imagine Bofield found his account in the elevator, though he
did complain sometimes that such persons went up and down on frivolous
pretexts or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun
as the centre of “trading” for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon
over-supplied that limit in demand; so that when other interests added
themselves to the activity of the town there was still plenty of room
for the business they brought. Main Street was really, therefore, not a
fair index; nobody in Elgin would have admitted it. Its appearance and
demeanour would never have suggested that it was now the chief artery
of a thriving manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute, eleven
churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for the deaf and dumb, to
say nothing of a fire department unsurpassed for organization and
achievement in the Province of Ontario. Only at twelve noon it might be
partly realized when the prolonged “toots” of seven factory whistles at
once let off, so to speak, the hour. Elgin liked the demonstration; it
was held to be cheerful and unmistakable, an indication of “go-ahead”
 proclivities which spoke for itself. It occurred while yet Dr Drummond
and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door.

“I must be getting on,” said the minister, looking at his watch. “And
what news have you of Lorne?”

“Well, he seems to have got through all right.”

“What--you’ve heard already, then?”

“He telegraphed from Toronto on Saturday night.” Mr Murchison stroked
his chin, the better to retain his satisfaction. “Waste of money--the
post would have brought it this morning--but it pleased his mother. Yes,
he’s through his Law Schools examination, and at the top, too, as far as
I can make out.”

“Dear me, and you never mentioned it!” Dr Drummond spoke with the
resigned impatience of a familiar grievance. It was certainly a trying
characteristic of John Murchison that he never cared about communicating
anything that might seem to ask for congratulation. “Well, well! I’m
very glad to hear it.”

“It slipped my mind,” said Mr Murchison. “Yes, he’s full-fledged
‘barrister and solicitor’ now; he can plead your case or draw you up a
deed with the best of them. Lorne’s made a fair record, so far. We’ve no
reason to be ashamed of him.”

“That you have not.” Personal sentiments between these two Scotchmen
were indicated rather than indulged. “He’s going in with Fulke and
Warner, I suppose--you’ve got that fixed up?”

“Pretty well. Old man Warner was in this morning to talk it over. He
says they look to Lorne to bring them in touch with the new generation.
It’s a pity he lost that son of his.”

“Oh, a great pity. But since they had to go outside the firm they
couldn’t have done better; they couldn’t have done better. I hope Lorne
will bring them a bit of Knox Church business too; there’s no reason why
Bob Mackintosh should have it all. They’ll be glad to see him back at
the Hampden Debating Society. He’s a great light there, is Lorne; and
the Young Liberals, I hear are wanting him for chairman this year.”

“There’s some talk of it. But time enough--time enough for that! He’ll
do first-rate if he gets the law to practise, let alone the making of
it.”

“Maybe so; he’s young yet. Well, good morning to you. I’ll just step
over the way to the Express office and get a proof out of them of
that sermon of mine. I noticed their reporter fellow--what’s his
name?--Rawlins, with his pencil out last night, and I’ve no faith in
Rawlins.”

“Better cast an eye over it,” responded Mr Murchison cordially, and
stood for a moment or two longer in the door watching the crisp,
significant little figure of the minister as he stepped briskly over the
crossing to the newspaper office. There Dr Drummond sat down, before he
explained his errand, and wrote a paragraph.

“We are pleased to learn,” it ran “that Mr Lorne Murchison, eldest son
of Mr John Murchison, of this town, has passed at the capital of the
Province his final examination in Law, distinguishing himself by coming
out at the top of the list. It will be remembered that Mr Murchison,
upon entering the Law Schools, also carried off a valuable scholarship.
We are glad to be able to announce that Mr Murchison, Junior, will
embark upon his profession in his native town, where he will enter the
well-known firm of Fulke and Warner.”

The editor, Mr Horace Williams, had gone to dinner, and Rawlins was out
so Dr Drummond had to leave it with the press foreman. Mr Williams read
it appreciatively on his return, and sent it down with the following
addition:

“This is doing it as well as it can be done. Elgin congratulates Mr L.
Murchison upon having produced these results, and herself upon having
produced Mr L. Murchison.”



CHAPTER III

From the day she stepped into it Mrs Murchison knew that the Plummer
Place was going to be the bane of her existence. This may have been
partly because Mr Murchison had bought it, since a circumstance welded
like that into one’s life is very apt to assume the character of a bane,
unless one’s temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs Murchison’s
didn’t. But there were other reasons more difficult to traverse: it was
plainly true that the place did require a tremendous amount of “looking
after,” as such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking after
than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They could never have
afforded, in the beginning, to possess it had it not been sold, under
mortgage, at a dramatic sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair,
built of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs compassing
the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had
only to turn his hand to the forest. It stood on the very edge of
the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and
corn-stacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army. The
plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road or, if you
were so inclined, the river, into which you could throw a stone from
the orchard of the Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in
ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each
side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected
by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that
a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the
middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton,
most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed
air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was
also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a
lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often said,
must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money
to live up to them. The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn,
till a succession of “girls” left on account of the milking, and the
lane was useful as an approach to the backyard by the teams that brought
the cordwood in the winter. It was trying enough for a person with
the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door
circumstances which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison often
declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there.
It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison
in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier,
and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece. She had an icehouse
and a wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected
with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not
one of them was in order. She had far too much, as she declared, for
any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not
dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library
or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted
reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not to put his foot through
it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just
have to drop. The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible
amelioration--it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs
Murchison often wished she could afford to pull it down.

It may be realized that in spite of its air of being impossible
to “overtake”--I must, in this connection, continue to quote its
mistress--there was an attractiveness about the dwelling of the
Murchisons the attractiveness of the large ideas upon which it had
been built and designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced
income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous view to economy
and occupation, to perish of the readjustment. The case of such persons,
when they arrive, is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local
understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be entitled
to respect, but nothing can save them from the isolation of their
difference and their misapprehension. It was like that with the house.
The house was admired--without enthusiasm--but it was not copied. It
was felt to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it
wore its superiority in the popular view like a folly. It was in Elgin,
but not of it: it represented a different tradition; and Elgin made the
same allowance for its bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities
as was conceded to its original master’s habit of a six-o’clock dinner,
with wine.

The architectural expression of the town was on a different scale,
beginning with “frame,” rising through the semidetached, culminating
expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas and modern conveniences, and
blossoming, in extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk
portieres for interior decoration. The Murchison house gained by force
of contrast: one felt, stepping into it, under influences of less
expediency and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention;
its shabby spaces had a redundancy the pleasanter and its yellow plaster
cornices a charm the greater for the numerous close-set examples of
contemporary taste in red brick which made, surrounded by geranium beds,
so creditable an appearance in the West Ward. John Murchison in taking
possession of the house had felt in it these satisfactions, had been
definitely penetrated and soothed by them, the more perhaps because he
brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier things of life which
circumstances had not previously developed. He seized the place with a
sense of opportunity leaping sharp and conscious out of early years
in the grey “wynds” of a northern Scottish town; and its personality
sustained him, very privately but none the less effectively, through
the worry and expense of it for years. He would take his pipe and walk
silently for long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening,
for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts in flower; and
he never opened the hall door without a feeling of gratification in
its weight as it swung under his hand. In so far as he could, he
supplemented the idiosyncrasies he found. The drawing-room walls, though
mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper--lavender and gilt, a
grape-vine pattern--held a few good engravings; the library was reduced
to contain a single bookcase, but it was filled with English classics.
John Murchison had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the
discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books. He bought them
between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the
expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under
his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose
itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe. Mrs Murchison
kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband
brought home Chambers’s Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly
and definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new
winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all endurance. Mrs
Murchison was surrounded, indeed, by more of “that sort of thing”
 than she could find use or excuse for; since, though books made but a
sporadic appearance, current literature, daily, weekly, and monthly,
was perpetually under her feet. The Toronto paper came as a matter of
course, as the London daily takes its morning flight into the provinces,
the local organ as simply indispensable, the Westminster as the
corollary of church membership and for Sunday reading. These were
constant, but there were also mutables--Once a Week, Good Words for
the Young, Blackwood’s, and the Cornhill they used to be; years of back
numbers Mrs Murchison had packed away in the attic, where Advena
on rainy days came into the inheritance of them, and made an early
acquaintance with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner’s Pride,
while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious hours on The
Back of the North Wind. Their father considered such publications and
their successors essential, like tobacco and tea. He was also an easy
prey to the subscription agent, for works published in parts and
paid for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded with
abhorrence. So much so that when John put his name down for Masterpieces
of the World’s Art, which was to cost twenty dollars by the time it was
complete, he thought it advisable to let the numbers accumulate at the
store.

Whatever the place represented to their parents, it was pure joy to the
young Murchisons. It offered a margin and a mystery to life. They saw
it far larger than it was; they invested it, arguing purely by its
difference from other habitations, with a romantic past. “I guess
when the Prince of Wales came to Elgin, Mother, he stayed here,” Lorne
remarked, as a little boy. Secretly he and Advena took up boards in more
than one unused room, and rapped on more than one thick wall to find a
hollow chamber; the house revealed so much that was interesting, it was
apparent to the meanest understanding that it must hide even more.
It was never half lighted, and there was a passage in which fear
dwelt--wild were the gallopades from attic to cellar in the early
nightfall, when every young Murchison tore after every other, possessed,
like cats, by a demoniac ecstasy of the gloaming. And the garden, with
the autumn moon coming over the apple trees and the neglected asparagus
thick for ambush, and a casual untrimmed boy or two with the delicious
recommendation of being utterly without credentials, to join in the rout
and be trusted to make for the back fence without further hint at the
voice of Mrs Murchison--these were joys of the very fibre, things to
push ideas and envisage life with an attraction that made it worth while
to grow up.

And they had all achieved it--all six. They had grown up sturdily,
emerging into sobriety and decorum by much the same degrees as the old
house, under John Murchison’s improving fortunes, grew cared for and
presentable. The new roof went on, slate replacing shingles, the year
Abby put her hair up; the bathroom was contemporary with Oliver’s
leaving school; the electric light was actually turned on for the
first time in honour of Lorne’s return from Toronto, a barrister and
solicitor; several rooms had been done up for Abby’s wedding. Abby had
married, early and satisfactorily, Dr Harry Johnson, who had placidly
settled down to await the gradual succession of his father’s practice;
“Dr Harry and Dr Henry” they were called. Dr Harry lived next door to
Dr Henry, and had a good deal of the old man’s popular manner. It was
an unacknowledged partnership, which often provided two opinions for the
same price; the town prophesied well of it. That left only five at
home, but they always had Abby over in the West Ward, where Abby’s
housekeeping made an interest and Abby’s baby a point of pilgrimage.
These considerations almost consoled Mrs Murchison declaring, as she
did, that all of them might have gone but Abby, who alone knew how to be
“any comfort or any dependence” in the house; who could be left with a
day’s preserving; and I tell you that to be left by Mrs Murchison with a
day’s preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons or pears, was
a mark of confidence not easy to obtain. Advena never had it; Advena,
indeed, might have married and removed no prop of the family economy.
Mrs Murchison would have been “sorry for the man”--she maintained
a candour toward and about those belonging to her that permitted no
illusions--but she would have stood cheerfully out of the way on her
own account. When you have seen your daughter reach and pass the age
of twenty-five without having learned properly to make her own bed, you
know without being told that she will never be fit for the management of
a house--don’t you? Very well then. And for ever and for ever, no matter
what there was to do, with a book in her hand--Mrs Murchison would put
an emphasis on the “book” which scarcely concealed a contempt for such
absorption. And if, at the end of your patience, you told her for any
sake to put it down and attend to matters, obeying in a kind of dream
that generally drove you to take the thing out of her hands and do it
yourself, rather than jump out of your skin watching her.

Sincerely Mrs Murchison would have been sorry for the man if he had
arrived, but he had not arrived. Advena justified her existence by
taking the university course for women at Toronto, and afterward
teaching the English branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate
Institute, which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic
criticism. Mrs Murchison was thankful to have her there--outside--where
little more could reasonably be expected of her than that she should
be down in time for breakfast. It is so irritating to be justified
in expecting more than seems likely to come. Mrs Murchison’s ideas
circulated strictly in the orbit of equity and reason; she expected
nothing from anybody that she did not expect from herself; indeed, she
would spare others in far larger proportion. But the sense of obligation
which led her to offer herself up to the last volt of her energy made
her miserable when she considered that she was not fairly done by in
return. Pressed down and running over were the services she offered to
the general good, and it was on the ground of the merest justice that
she required from her daughters “some sort of interest” in domestic
affairs. From her eldest she got no sort of interest, and it was
like the removal of a grievance from the hearth when Advena took up
employment which ranged her definitely beyond the necessity of being
of any earthly use in the house. Advena’s occupation to some extent
absorbed her shortcomings, which was much better than having to
attribute them to her being naturally “through-other,” or naturally
clever, according to the bias of the moment. Mrs Murchison no longer
excused or complained of her daughter; but she still pitied the man.

“The boys,” of course, were too young to think of matrimony. They were
still the boys, the Murchison boys; they would be the boys at forty if
they remained under their father’s roof. In the mother country, men in
short jackets and round collars emerge from the preparatory schools; in
the daughter lands boys in tailcoats conduct serious affairs. Alec
and Oliver, in the business, were frivolous enough as to the feminine
interest. For all Dr Drummond’s expressed and widely known views upon
the subject, it was a common thing for one or both of these young men
to stray from the family pew on Sunday evenings to the services of other
communions, thereafter to walk home in the dusk under the maples with
some attractive young person, and be sedately invited to finish the
evening on her father’s verandah. Neither of them was guiltless of silk
ties knitted or handkerchiefs initialled by certain fingers; without
repeating scandal, one might say by various fingers. For while the
ultimate import of these matters was not denied in Elgin, there was
a general feeling against giving too much meaning to them, probably
originating in a reluctance among heads of families to add to their
responsibilities. These early spring indications were belittled and
laughed at; so much so that the young people them selves hardly
took them seriously, but regarded them as a form of amusement almost
conventional. Nothing would have surprised or embarrassed them more
than to learn that their predilections had an imperative corollary,
that anything should, of necessity, “come of it.” Something, of course,
occasionally did come of it; and, usually after years of “attention,” a
young man of Elgin found himself mated to a young woman, but never under
circumstances that could be called precipitate or rash. The cautious
blood and far sight of the early settlers, who had much to reckon with,
were still preponderant social characteristics of the town they cleared
the site for. Meanwhile, however, flowers were gathered, and all sorts
of evanescent idylls came and went in the relations of young men and
maidens. Alec and Oliver Murchison were already in the full tide of
them.

From this point of view they did not know what to make of Lorne. It was
not as if their brother were in any way ill calculated to attract that
interest which gave to youthful existence in Elgin almost the only
flavour that it had. Looks are looks, and Lorne had plenty of them;
taller by an inch than Alec, broader by two than Oliver, with a fine
square head and blue eyes in it, and features which conveyed purpose and
humour, lighted by a certain simplicity of soul that pleased even when
it was not understood. “Open,” people said he was, and “frank”--so he
was, frank and open, with horizons and intentions; you could see them in
his face. Perhaps it was more conscious of them than he was. Ambition,
definitely shining goals, adorn the perspectives of young men in new
countries less often than is commonly supposed. Lorne meant to be a good
lawyer, squarely proposed to himself that the country should hold no
better; and as to more selective usefulness, he hoped to do a little
stumping for the right side when Frank Jennings ran for the Ontario
House in the fall. It wouldn’t be his first electioneering: from the day
he became chairman of the Young Liberals the party had an eye on him,
and when occasion arose, winter or summer, by bobsleigh or buggy,
weatherbeaten local bosses would convey him to country schoolhouses for
miles about to keep a district sound on railway policy, or education,
or tariff reform. He came home smiling with the triumphs of these
occasions, and offered them, with the slow, good-humoured, capable drawl
that inspired such confidence in him, to his family at breakfast, who
said “Great!” or “Good for you, Lorne!” John Murchison oftenest said
nothing, but would glance significantly at his wife, frowning and
pursing his lips when she, who had most spirit of them all, would
exclaim, “You’ll be Premier yet, Lorne!” It was no part of the Murchison
policy to draw against future balances: they might believe everything,
they would express nothing; and I doubt whether Lorne himself had any
map of the country he meant to travel over in that vague future, already
defining in local approbation, and law business coming freely in with
a special eye on the junior partner. But the tract was there,
subconscious, plain in the wider glance, the alerter manner; plain even
in the grasp and stride which marked him in a crowd; plain, too, in the
preoccupation with other issues, were it only turning over a leader
in the morning’s Dominion, that carried him along indifferent to the
allurements I have described. The family had a bond of union in their
respect for Lorne, and this absence of nugatory inclinations in him
was among its elements. Even Stella who, being just fourteen, was the
natural mouthpiece of family sentiment, would declare that Lorne had
something better to do than go hanging about after girls, and for her
part she thought all the more of him for it.



CHAPTER IV

“I am requested to announce,” said Dr Drummond after the singing of the
last hymn, “the death, yesterday morning, of James Archibald Ramsay,
for fifteen years an adherent and for twenty-five years a member of this
church. The funeral will take place from the residence of the deceased,
on Court House Street, tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock. Friends and
acquaintances are respectfully--invited--to attend.”

The minister’s voice changed with the character of its affairs. Still
vibrating with the delivery of his sermon, it was now charged with the
official business of the interment. In its inflections it expressed both
elegy and eulogy; and in the brief pause before and after “invited” and
the fall of “attend” there was the last word of comment upon the mortal
term. A crispation of interest passed over the congregation; every chin
was raised. Dr Drummond’s voice had a wonderful claiming power, but he
often said he wished his congregation would pay as undivided attention
to the sermon as they did to the announcements.

“The usual weekly prayer meeting will be held in the basement of the
church on Wednesday evening.” Then almost in a tone of colloquy, and
with just a hint of satire about his long upper lip--

“I should be glad to see a better attendance of the young people at
these gatherings. Time was when the prayer meeting counted among our
young men and women as an occasion not to be lightly passed over. In
these days it would seem that there is too much business to be done, or
too much pleasure to be enjoyed, for the oncoming generation to remember
their weekly engagement with the Lord. This is not as it should be; and
I rely upon the fathers and mothers of this congregation, who brought
these children in their arms to the baptismal font, there to be admitted
to the good hopes and great privileges of the Church of God--I rely upon
them to see that there shall be no departure from the good old rule, and
that time is found for the weekly prayer meeting.”

Mrs Murchison nudged Stella, who returned the attention, looking
elaborately uninterested, with her foot. Alec and Oliver smiled
consciously; their father, with an expression of severe gravity, backed
up the minister who, after an instant’s pause, continued--

“On Tuesday afternoon next, God willing, I shall visit the following
families in the East Ward--Mr Peterson, Mr Macormack, Mrs Samuel Smith,
and Mr John Flint. On Thursday afternoon in the South Ward, Mrs Reid,
Mr P. C. Cameron, and Mr Murchison. We will close by singing the Third
Doxology: Blessed, blessed be Jehovah, Israel’s God to all eternity--”

The congregation trooped out; the Murchisons walked home in a clan, Mr
and Mrs Murchison, with Stella skirting the edge of the sidewalk beside
them, the two young men behind. Abby, when she married Harry, had “gone
over” to the Church of England. The wife must worship with the husband;
even Dr Drummond recognized the necessity, though he professed small
opinion of the sway of the spouse who, with Presbyterian traditions
behind her, could not achieve union the other way about; and Abby’s
sanctioned defection was a matter of rather shame-faced reference by her
family. Advena and Lorne had fallen into the degenerate modern habit of
preferring the evening service.

“So we’re to have the Doctor on Thursday,” said Mrs Murchison, plainly
not displeased. “Well, I hope the dining-room carpet will be down.”

“I expect he’ll be wanting his tea,” replied Mr Murchison. “He’s got you
in the right place on the list for that, Mother--as usual.”

“I’d just like to see him go anywhere else for his tea the day he was
coming to our house,” declared Stella. “But he GENERALLY has too much
sense.”

“You boys,” said Mrs Murchison, turning back to her sons, “will see that
you’re on hand that evening. And I hope the Doctor will rub it in about
the prayer meeting.” Mrs Murchison chuckled. “I saw it went home to both
of you, and well it might. Yes, I think I may as well expect him to tea.
He enjoys my scalloped oysters, if I do say it myself.”

“We’ll get Abby over,” said Mr Murchison. “That’ll please the Doctor.”

“I must say,” remarked Stella, “he seems to think a lot more of Abby now
that she’s Mrs Episcopal Johnson.”

“Yes, Abby and Harry must come,” said Mrs Murchison, “and I was thinking
of inviting Mr and Mrs Horace Williams. We’ve been there till I’m
ashamed to look them in the face. And I’ve pretty well decided,” she
added autocratically, “to have chicken salad. So if Dr Drummond has made
up his mouth for scalloped oysters he’ll be disappointed.”

“Mother,” announced Stella, “I’m perfectly certain you’ll have both.”

“I’ll consider it,” replied her mother. “Meanwhile we would be better
employed in thinking of what we have been hearing. That’s the third
sermon from the Book of Job in six weeks. I must say, with the whole of
the two Testaments to select from, I don’t see why the Doctor should be
so taken up with Job.”

Stella was vindicated; Mrs Murchison did have both. The chicken salad
gleamed at one end of the table and the scalloped oysters smoked
delicious at the other. Lorne had charge of the cold tongue and Advena
was entrusted with the pickled pears. The rest of the family were
expected to think about the tea biscuits and the cake, for Lobelia had
never yet had a successor that was any hand with company. Mrs Murchison
had enough to do to pour out the tea. It was a table to do anybody
credit, with its glossy damask and the old-fashioned silver and
best china that Mrs Murchison had brought as a bride to her
housekeeping--for, thank goodness, her mother had known what was what
in such matters--a generous attractive table that you took some
satisfaction in looking at. Mrs Murchison came of a family of noted
housekeepers; where she got her charm I don’t know. Six-o’clock tea, and
that the last meal in the day, was the rule in Elgin, and a good enough
rule for Mrs Murchison, who had no patience with the innovation of a
late dinner recently adopted by some people who could keep neither
their servants nor their digestions in consequence. It had been a crisp
October day; as Mr Murchison remarked, the fall evenings were beginning
to draw in early; everybody was glad of the fire in the grate and the
closed curtains. Dr Drummond had come about five, and the inquiries and
comments upon family matters that the occasion made incumbent had been
briskly exchanged, with just the word that marked the pastoral visit
and the practical interest that relieved it. And he had thought, on the
whole, that he might manage to stay to tea, at which Mrs Murchison’s
eyes twinkled as she said affectionately--

“Now, Doctor, you know we could never let you off.”

Then Abby had arrived and her husband, and finally Mr and Mrs Williams,
just a trifle late for etiquette, but well knowing that it mustn’t be
enough to spoil the biscuits. Dr Drummond in the place of honour,
had asked the blessing, and that brief reminder of the semiofficial
character of the occasion having been delivered, was in the best of
humours. The Murchisons were not far wrong in the happy divination
that he liked coming to their house. Its atmosphere appealed to him; he
expanded in its humour, its irregularity, its sense of temperament. They
were doubtful allurements, from the point of view of a minister of the
Gospel, but it would not occur to Dr Drummond to analyse them. So far
as he was aware, John Murchison was just a decent, prosperous, Christian
man, on whose word and will you might depend, and Mrs Murchison a
stirring, independent little woman, who could be very good company when
she felt inclined. As to their sons and daughters, in so far as they
were a credit, he was as proud of them as their parents could possibly
be, regarding himself as in a much higher degree responsible for the
formation of their characters and the promise of their talents. And
indeed, since every one of them had “sat under” Dr Drummond from the
day he or she was capable of sitting under anybody, Mr and Mrs Murchison
would have been the last to dispute this. It was not one of those houses
where a pastor could always be sure of leaving some spiritual benefit
behind; but then he came away himself with a pleasant sense of nervous
stimulus which was apt to take his mind off the matter. It is not given
to all of us to receive or to extend the communion of the saints; Mr
and Mrs Murchison were indubitably of the elect, but he was singularly
close-mouthed about it, and she had an extraordinary way of seeing the
humorous side--altogether it was paralysing, and the conversation would
wonderfully soon slip round to some robust secular subject, public or
domestic. I have mentioned Dr Drummond’s long upper lip; all sorts
of racial virtues resided there, but his mouth was also wide and much
frequented by a critical, humorous, philosophical smile which revealed
a view of life at once kindly and trenchant. His shrewd grey eyes were
encased in wrinkles, and when he laughed his hearty laugh they almost
disappeared in a merry line. He had a fund of Scotch stories, and one
or two he was very fond of, at the expense of the Methodists, that were
known up and down the Dominion, and nobody enjoyed them more than he
did himself. He had once worn his hair in a high curl on his scholarly
forehead, and a silvering tuft remained brushed upright; he took the
old-fashioned precaution of putting cotton wool in his ears, which
gave him more than ever the look of something highly concentrated and
conserved but in no way detracted from his dignity. St Andrew’s folk
accused him of vanity because of the diamond he wore on his little
finger. He was by no means handsome, but he was intensely individual;
perhaps he had vanity; his people would have forgiven him worse things.
And at Mrs Murchison’s tea party he was certainly, as John Murchison
afterward said, “in fine feather.”

An absorbing topic held them, a local topic, a topic involving loss and
crime and reprisals. The Federal Bank had sustained a robbery of five
thousand dollars, and in the course of a few days had placed their
cashier under arrest for suspected complicity. Their cashier was Walter
Ormiston, the only son of old Squire Ormiston, of Moneida Reservation,
ten miles out of Elgin, who had administered the affairs of the Indians
there for more years than the Federal Bank had existed. Mr Williams
brought the latest news, as was to be expected; news flowed in rivulets
to Mr Williams all day long; he paid for it, dealt in it, could spread
or suppress it.

“They’ve admitted the bail,” Mr Williams announced, with an air of
self-surveillance. Rawlins had brought the intelligence in too late for
the current issue, and Mr Williams was divided between his human desire
to communicate and his journalistic sense that the item would be the
main feature of the next afternoon’s Express.

“I’m glad of that. I’m glad of that,” repeated Dr Drummond. “Thank you,
Mrs Murchison, I’ll send my cup. And did you learn, Williams, for what
amount?”

Mr Williams ran his hand through his hair in the effort to remember, and
decided that he might as well let it all go. The Mercury couldn’t fail
to get it by tomorrow anyhow.

“Three thousand,” he said. “Milburn and Dr Henry Johnson.”

“I thought Father was bound to be in it,” remarked Dr Harry.

“Half and half?” asked John Murchison.

“No,” contributed Mrs Williams. “Mr Milburn two and Dr Henry one. Mr
Milburn is Walter’s uncle, you know.”

Mr Williams fastened an outraged glance on his wife, who looked another
way. Whatever he thought proper to do, it was absolutely understood that
she was to reveal nothing of what “came in,” and was even carefully to
conserve anything she heard outside with a view to bringing it in. Mrs
Williams was too prone to indiscretion in the matter of letting news
slip prematurely; and as to its capture, her husband would often
confess, with private humour, that Minnie wasn’t much of a mouser.

“Well, that’s something to be thankful for,” said Mrs Murchison. “I lay
awake for two hours last night thinking of that boy in jail, and his
poor old father, seventy-nine years of age, and such a fine old man, so
thoroughly respected.”

“I don’t know the young fellow,” said Dr Drummond, “but they say he’s
of good character, not over-solid, but bears a clean reputation. They’re
all Tories together, of course, the Ormistons.”

“It’s an old U. E. Loyalist family,” remarked Advena. “Mr Ormiston has
one or two rather interesting Revolutionary trophies at his house out
there.”

“None the worse for that. None the worse for that,” said Dr Drummond.

“Old Ormiston’s father,” contributed the editor of the Express, “had a
Crown grant of the whole of Moneida Reservation at one time. Government
actually bought it back from him to settle the Indians there. He was a
well-known Family Compact man, and fought tooth and nail for the Clergy
Reserves in ‘fifty.”

“Well, well,” said Dr Drummond, with a twinkle. “We’ll hope young
Ormiston is innocent, nevertheless.”

“Nasty business for the Federal Bank if he is,” Mr Williams went on.
“They’re a pretty unpopular bunch as it is.”

“Of course he’s innocent,” contributed Stella, with indignant eyes; “and
when they prove it, what can he do to the bank for taking him up? That’s
what I want to know.”

Her elders smiled indulgently. “A lot you know about it, kiddie,” said
Oliver. It was the only remark he made during the meal. Alec passed
the butter assiduously, but said nothing at all. Adolescence was
inarticulate in Elgin on occasions of ceremony.

“I hear they’ve piled up some big evidence,” said Mr Williams. “Young
Ormiston’s been fool enough to do some race-betting lately. Minnie,
I wish you’d get Mrs Murchison to show you how to pickle pears. Of
course,” he added, “they’re keeping it up their sleeve.”

“It’s a hard place to keep evidence,” said Lorne Murchison at last with
a smile which seemed to throw light on the matter. They had all been
waiting, more or less consciously, for what Lorne would have to say.

“Lorne, you’ve got it!” divined his mother instantly.

“Got what, Mother?”

“The case! I’ve suspected it from the minute the subject was mentioned!
That case came in today!”

“And you sitting there like a bump on a log, and never telling us!”
 exclaimed Stella, with reproach.

“Stella, you have a great deal too much to say,” replied her brother.
“Suppose you try sitting like a bump on a log. We won’t complain. Yes,
the Squire seems to have made up his mind about the defence, and my
seniors haven’t done much else today.”

“Rawlins saw him hitched up in front of your place for about two hours
this morning,” said Mr Williams. “I told him I thought that was good
enough, but we didn’t say anything, Rawlins having heard it was to be
Flynn from Toronto. And I hadn’t forgotten the Grand Trunk case we put
down to you last week without exactly askin’. Your old man was as mad as
a hornet--wanted to stop his subscription; Rawlins had no end of a time
to get round him. Little things like that will creep in when you’ve got
to trust to one man to run the whole local show. But I didn’t want the
Mercury to have another horse on us.”

“Do you think you’ll get a look in, Lorne?” asked Dr Harry.

“Oh, not a chance of it. The old man’s as keen as a razor on the case,
and you’d think Warner never had one before! If I get a bit of grubbing
to do, under supervision, they’ll consider I ought to be pleased.” It
was the sunniest possible tone of grumbling; it enlisted your sympathy
by its very acknowledgement that it had not a leg to stand on.

“They’re pretty wild about it out Moneida way,” said Dr Harry. “My
father says the township would put down the bail three times over.”

“They swear by the Squire out there,” said Mr Horace Williams, liberally
applying his napkin to his moustache. “He treated some of them more than
square when the fall wheat failed three years running, about ten years
back; do you remember, Mr Murchison? Lent them money at about half the
bank rate, and wasn’t in an awful sweat about getting it in at that
either.”

“And wasn’t there something about his rebuilding the school-house at his
own expense not so long ago?” asked Dr Drummond.

“Just what he did. I wanted to send Rawlins out and make a story of
it--we’d have given it a column, with full heads; but the old man didn’t
like it. It’s hard to know what some people will like. But it was my own
foolishness for asking. A thing like that is public property.”

“There’s a good deal of feeling,” said Lorne. “So much that I understand
the bank is moving for change of venue.”

“I hope they won’t get it,” said Dr Drummond sharply. “A strong local
feeling is valuable evidence in a case like this. I don’t half approve
this notion that a community can’t manage its own justice when it
happens to take an interest in the case. I’ve no more acquaintance with
the Squire than ‘How d’ye do?’ and I don’t know his son from Adam; but
I’d serve on the jury tomorrow if the Crown asked it, and there’s many
more like me.”

Mr Williams, who had made a brief note on his shirt cuff, restored his
pencil to his waistcoat pocket. “I shall oppose a change of venue,” said
he.



CHAPTER V

It was confidently expected by the Murchison family that when Stella was
old enough she would be a good deal in society. Stella, without doubt,
was well equipped for society; she had exactly those qualities which
appealed to it in Elgin, among which I will mention two--the quality
of being able to suggest that she was quite as good as anybody without
saying so, and the even more important quality of not being any better.
Other things being equal--those common worldly standards that prevailed
in Elgin as well as anywhere else in their degree--other things being
equal, this second simple quality was perhaps the most important of all.
Mr and Mrs Murchison made no claim and small attempt upon society. One
doubts whether, with children coming fast and hard times long at the
door, they gave the subject much consideration; but if they did, it is
highly unlikely to have occurred to them that they were too good
for their environment. Yet in a manner they were. It was a matter of
quality, of spiritual and mental fabric; they were hardly aware that
they had it, but it marked them with a difference, and a difference is
the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own
intelligible averages, will not tolerate. The unusual may take on
an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is
understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is
regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among
law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation. It is a sound enough social
principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of
temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons. Such
a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius, emancipated from
the common interests, possibly inimical to the general good; and when,
later on, your genius takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he
has and gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd nods
before the vindicating fact.

Nobody knew it at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons’ case. They
had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren’t
going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration.
Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was
out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms. Once as a
little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it
home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison’s reception of the suggested
duty may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances--a trick like
that! The inevitable hour arrived when she should be instructed on
the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was
discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after
her. She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage
informed her family that it was a waste of money. She would hide in
the hayloft with a novel; she would be off by herself in a canoe at
six o’clock in the morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy
October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along in front of
her “in a dream.” No one could dream with impunity in Elgin, except
in bed. Mothers of daughters sympathized in good set terms with Mrs
Murchison. “If that girl were mine--” they would say, and leave you with
a stimulated notion of the value of corporal punishment. When she took
to passing examinations and teaching, Elgin considered that her parents
ought to be thankful in the probability that she had escaped some
dramatic end. But her occupation further removed her from intercourse
with the town’s more exclusive circles: she had taken a definite line,
and she pursued it, preoccupied. If she was a brand snatched from the
burning, she sent up a little curl of reflection in a safe place, where
she was not further interrupted.

Abby, inheriting all these prejudices, had nevertheless not done so
badly; she had taken no time at all to establish herself; she had almost
immediately married. In the social estimates of Elgin the Johnsons were
“nice people,” Dr Henry was a fine old figure in the town, and Abby’s
chances were good enough. At all events, when she opened her doors as
a bride, receiving for three afternoons in her wedding dress, everybody
had “called.” It was very distinctly understood, of course, that this
was a civility that need not lead to anything whatever, a kind of bowing
recognition, to be formally returned and quite possibly to end there.
With Abby, in a good many cases, it hadn’t ended there; she was doing
very well, and as she often said with private satisfaction, if she went
out anywhere she was just as likely as not to meet her brothers. Elgin
society, shaping itself, I suppose, to ultimate increase and prosperity,
had this peculiarity, that the females of a family, in general
acceptance, were apt to lag far behind the males. Alec and Oliver
enjoyed a good deal of popularity, and it was Stella’s boast that if
Lorne didn’t go out much it needn’t be supposed he wasn’t asked. It was
an accepted state of things in Elgin that young men might be invited
without their sisters, implying an imperturbability greater than
London’s, since London may not be aware of the existence of sisters,
while Elgin knew all sorts of more interesting things about them. The
young men were more desirable than the young women; they forged ahead,
carrying the family fortunes, and the “nicest” of them were the young
men in the banks. Others might be more substantial, but there was an
allure about a young man in a bank as difficult to define as to resist.
To say of a certain party-giver that she had “about every bank clerk
in town” was to announce the success of her entertainment in ultimate
terms. These things are not always penetrable, but no doubt his
gentlemanly form of labour and its abridgement in the afternoons, when
other young men toiled on till the stroke of six, had something to do
with this apotheosis of the bank clerk, as well as his invariable taste
in tailoring, and the fact that some local family influence was probably
represented in his appointment. Privilege has always its last little
stronghold, and it still operates to admiration on the office stools of
minor finance in towns like Elgin. At all events, the sprouting tellers
and cashiers held unquestioned sway--young doctors and lawyers simply
didn’t think of competing; and since this sort of thing carries its own
penalty, the designation which they shared with so many distinguished
persons in history became a byword on the lips of envious persons
and small boys, by which they wished to express effeminacy and the
substantive of the “stuck-up.” “D’ye take me fur a bank clurk?” was
a form of repudiation among corner loafers as forcible as it was
unjustifiable.

I seem to have embarked, by way of getting to the Milburns’ party--there
is a party at the Milburns’ and some of us are going--upon an analysis
of social principles in Elgin, an adventure of difficulty, as I have
once or twice hinted, but one from which I cannot well extricate myself
without at least leaving a clue or two more for the use of the curious.
No doubt these rules had their nucleus in the half-dozen families, among
whom we may count the shadowy Plummers, who took upon themselves for
Fox County, by the King’s pleasure, the administration of justice, the
practice of medicine and of the law, and the performance of the charges
of the Church of England a long time ago. Such persons would bring their
lines of demarcation with them, and in their new milieu of backwoods
settlers and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them
again. But it was a very long time ago. The little knot of gentry-folk
soon found the limitations of their new conditions; years went by in
decades, aggrandizing none of them. They took, perforce, to the ways
of the country, and soon nobody kept a groom but the Doctor, and nobody
dined late but the Judge. There came a time when the Sheriff’s whist
club and the Archdeacon’s port became a tradition to the oldest
inhabitant. Trade flourished, education improved, politics changed. Her
Majesty removed her troops--the Dominion wouldn’t pay, a poor-spirited
business--and a bulwark went with the regiment. The original dignified
group broke, dissolved, scattered. Prosperous traders foreclosed them,
the spirit of the times defeated them, young Liberals succeeded them in
office. Their grandsons married the daughters of well-to-do persons who
came from the north of Ireland, the east of Scotland, and the Lord knows
where. It was a sorry tale of disintegration with a cheerful sequel of
rebuilding, leading to a little unavoidable confusion as the edifice
went up. Any process of blending implies confusion to begin with; we are
here at the making of a nation.

This large consideration must dispose of small anomalies, such as the
acceptance, without cant, of certain forms of the shop, euphemized as
the store, but containing the same old vertebral counter. Not all forms.
Dry-goods were held in respect and chemists in comparative esteem; house
furnishings and hardware made an appreciable claim, and quite a leading
family was occupied with seed grains. Groceries, on the other hand, were
harder to swallow, possibly on account of the apron, though the grocer’s
apron, being of linen, had several degrees more consideration than
the shoemaker’s, which was of leather; smaller trades made smaller
pretensions; Mrs Milburn could tell you where to draw the line.
They were all hard-working folk together, but they had their little
prejudices: the dentist was known as “Doc,” but he was not considered
quite on a medical level; it was doubtful whether you bowed to the
piano-tuner, and quite a curious and unreasonable contempt was bound up
in the word “veterinary.” Anything “wholesale” or manufacturing stood,
of course, on its own feet; there was nothing ridiculous in molasses,
nothing objectionable in a tannery, nothing amusing in soap. Such airs
and graces were far from Elgin, too fundamentally occupied with the
amount of capital invested, and too profoundly aware how hard it was to
come by. The valuable part of it all was a certain bright freedom, and
this was of the essence. Trade was a decent communal way of making a
living, rooted in independence and the general need; it had none of
the meaner aspects. Your bow was negligible to the piano-tuner, and
everything veterinary held up its head. And all this again qualified,
as everywhere, by the presence or absence of the social faculty, that
magnetic capacity for coming, as Mrs Murchison would say, “to the fore,”
 which makes little of disadvantages that might seem insuperable and, in
default, renders null and void the most unquestionable claims. Anyone
would think of the Delarues. Mr Delarue had in the dim past married his
milliner, yet the Delarues were now very much indeed to the fore. And,
on the other hand, the Leverets of the saw mills, rich and benevolent;
the Leverets were not in society simply, if you analysed it, because
they did not appear to expect to be in it. Certainly it was well not to
be too modest; assuredly, as Mrs Murchison said, you put your own ticket
on, though that dear soul never marked herself in very plain figures,
not knowing, perhaps for one thing, quite how much she was worth. On the
other hand, “Scarce of company, welcome trumpery,” Mrs Murchison always
emphatically declared to be no part of her social philosophy. The upshot
was that the Murchisons were confined to a few old friends and looked,
as we know, half-humorously, half-ironically, for more brilliant
excursions, to Stella and “the boys.”

It was only, however, the pleasure of Mr Lorne Murchison’s company that
was requested at the Milburns’ dance. Almost alone among those who had
slipped into wider and more promiscuous circles with the widening of the
stream, the Milburns had made something like an effort to hold out.
The resisting power was not thought to reside in Mr Milburn, who was
personally aware of no special ground for it, but in Mrs Milburn and her
sister, Miss Filkin, who seemed to have inherited the strongest ideas.
in the phrase of the place, about keeping themselves to themselves.
A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far from the
fountainhead, with its pleasing proof that such views were once the most
general and the most sacred defence of middle-class firesides, and
that Thackeray had, after all, a good deal to excuse him. Crossing
the Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all that was
possible to conserve them under very adverse conditions Mrs Milburn
and Miss Filkin made it their duty to do. Nor were these ideas opposed,
contested, or much traversed in Elgin. It was recognized that there was
“something about” Mrs Milburn and her sister--vaguely felt--that you did
not come upon that thinness of nostril, and slope of shoulder, and set
of elbow at every corner. They must have got it somewhere. A Filkin
tradition prevailed, said to have originated in Nova Scotia: the Filkins
never had been accessible, but if they wanted to keep to themselves, let
them. In this respect Dora Milburn, the only child, was said to be her
mother’s own daughter. The shoulders, at all events, testified to it;
and the young lady had been taught to speak, like Mrs Milburn, with what
was known as an “English accent.” The accent in general use in Elgin was
borrowed--let us hope temporarily--from the other side of the line. It
suffered local modifications and exaggerations, but it was clearly an
American product. The English accent was thoroughly affected, especially
the broad “a.” The time may come when Elgin will be at considerable
pains to teach itself the broad “a,” but that is in the embroidery of
the future, and in no way modifies the criticism of Dora Milburn.

Lorne Murchison, however, was invited to the dance. The invitation
reached him through the post: coming home from office early on Saturday
he produced it from his pocket. Mrs Murchison and Abby sat on the
verandah enjoying the Indian summer afternoon; the horse chestnuts
dropped crashing among the fallen leaves, the roadside maples blazed,
the quiet streets ran into smoky purple, and one belated robin hopped
about the lawn. Mrs Murchison had just remarked that she didn’t know
why, at this time of year, you always felt as if you were waiting for
something.

“Well, I hope you feel honoured,” remarked Abby. Not one of them
would have thought that Lorne should feel especially honoured; but the
insincerity was so obvious that it didn’t matter. Mrs Murchison, cocking
her head to read the card, tried hard not to look pleased.

“Mrs Milburn. At Home,” she read. “Dancing. Well she might be at home
dancing, for all me! Why couldn’t she just write you a little friendly
note, or let Dora do it? It’s that Ormiston case,” she went on shrewdly.
“They know you’re taking a lot of trouble about it. And the least they
could do, too.”

Lorne sat down on the edge of the verandah with his hands in his
trousers pockets, and stuck his long legs out in front of him. “Oh, I
don’t know,” he said. “They have the name of being nifty, but I haven’t
got anything against the Milburns.”

“Name!” ejaculated Mrs Murchison. “Now long ago was it the Episcopalians
began that sewing-circle business for the destitute clergy of
Saskatchewan?”

“Mother!” put in Abby, with deprecation.

“Well, I won’t be certain about the clergy, but I tell you it had to do
with Saskatchewan, for that I remember! And anyhow, the first meeting
was held at the Milburns’--members lent their drawing-rooms. Well, Mrs
Leveret and Mrs Delarue went to the meeting--they were very thick just
then, the Leverets and the Delarues. They were so pleased to be going
that they got there about five minutes too soon, and they were the first
to come. Well, they rang the bell and in they went. The girl showed them
into the front drawing-room and asked them to sit down. And there in the
back drawing-room sat Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin, AND NEVER SPOKE TO
THEM! Took not the smallest notice, any more than if they had been stray
cats--not so much! Their own denomination, mind you, too! And there they
might have been sitting still if Mrs Leveret hadn’t had the spirit to
get up and march out. No thank you. No Milburns for me.”

Lorne watched his mother with twinkling eyes till she finished.

“Well, Mother, after that, if it was going to be a sewing circle I think
I’d send an excuse,” he said, “but maybe they won’t be so mean at a
dance.”



CHAPTER VI

Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to being considered,
with relation to his own line in life, a representative man. He would
have been wary to claim it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided
at this view of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the
stranger’s power of induction. That is what he was--a man of averages,
balances, the safe level, no more disposed to an extravagant opinion
than to wear one side whisker longer than the other. You would take him
any day, especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct medium:
by his careful walk with the spring in it, his shrewd glance with
the caution in it, his look of being prepared to account for himself,
categorically, from head to foot. He was fond of explaining, in
connection with an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago,
that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a fortune under
the Stars and Stripes. There we have the turn of his mind, convertible
into the language of bookkeeping, a balance struck, with the profit on
the side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound terms of
dollars and cents. With this position understood, he was prepared to
take you up on any point of comparison between the status and privileges
of a subject and a citizen--the political MORALE of a monarchy and a
republic--the advantage of life on this and the other side of the line.
There was nothing he liked better to expatiate upon, with that
valuable proof of his own sincerity always at hand for reference
and illustration. His ideal was life in a practical, go-ahead,
self-governing colony, far enough from England actually to be disabused
of her inherited anachronisms and make your own tariff, near enough
politically to keep your securities up by virtue of her protection. He
was extremely satisfied with his own country; one saw in his talk the
phenomenon of patriotism in double bloom, flower within flower. I have
mentioned his side whiskers: he preserved that facial decoration of
the Prince Consort; and the large steel engraving that represents Queen
Victoria in a flowing habit and the Prince in a double-breasted frock
coat and a stock, on horseback, hung over the mantelpiece in his
drawing-room. If the outer patriotism was a little vague, the inner had
vigour enough. Canada was a great place. Mr Milburn had been born in the
country, and had never “gone over” to England; Canada was good enough
for him. He was born, one might say, in the manufacturing interest, and
inherited the complacent and Conservative political views of a tenderly
nourished industry. Mr Milburn was of those who were building up the
country; with sufficient protection he was prepared to go on doing it
long and loyally; meanwhile he admired the structure from all points of
view. As President of the Elgin Chamber of Commerce, he was enabled once
a year to produce no end of gratifying figures; he was fond of wearing
on such occasions the national emblem in a little enamelled maple leaf;
and his portrait and biography occupied a full page in a sumptuous
work entitled Canadians of Today, sold by subscription, where he was
described as the “Father of the Elgin Boiler.”

Mr and Mrs Milburn were in the drawing-room to receive their young
guests, a circumstance which alone imparted a distinction to the
entertainment. At such parties the appearance of the heads of the house
was by no means invariable; frequently they went to bed. The simple
explanation was that the young people could stand late hours and be none
the worse next day; their elders had to be more careful if they wanted
to get down to business. Moreover, as in all new societies, between the
older and the younger generation there was a great gulf fixed, across
which intercourse was difficult. The sons and daughters, born to
different circumstances, evolved their own conventions, the old people
used the ways and manners of narrower days; one paralysed the other. It
might be gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address
of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former; but
polite conversation, at best, was sustained with discomfort. Such
considerations, however, were far from operating with the Milburns.
Mrs Milburn would have said that they were characteristic of quite a
different class of people; and so they were.

No one would have supposed, from the way in which the family disposed
itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished
making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till
the last minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct
understanding with the maid--Mrs Milburn’s servants were all “maids,”
 even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands--on the subject of
wearing a cap when she answered the door. Mrs Milburn sat on a chair
she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora
performed lightly at the piano; Miss Filkin dipped into Selections
from the Poets of the Century, placed as remotely as possible from the
others; Mr Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto
evening paper. Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper
in the drawing-room. “Won’t you look at a magazine, Octavius?” she said;
but Mr Milburn advanced the argument that it removed “any appearance
of stiffness,” and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more
disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes
of people; indeed, when Mr Lorne Murchison arrived--like the unfortunate
Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, he was the first--they looked almost
surprised to see him.

Lorne told his mother afterward that he thought, in that embarrassing
circumstance, of Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, and they laughed
consumedly together over his discomforture; but what he felt at the
moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and
solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in
Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the
entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin
would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the
thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would
have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding,
by next morning he didn’t mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the
cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the
points of the compass of the Milburns’ drawing-room to shake hands,
burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn he
grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward,
a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical
action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with
an amusement not untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with
several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she
had a remarkable, effective, useful reticence. Her father declared
that Dora took in a great deal more than she ever gave out--an
accomplishment, in Mr Milburn’s eyes, on the soundest basis. She looked
remarkably pretty and had remarkably good style, and as she proceeded
with her mazurka she was thinking, “He has never been asked here before:
how perfectly silly he must feel coming so early!” Presently as Lorne
grew absorbed in talk and forgot his unhappy chance, she further
reflected, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him till now in evening
dress; it does make him a good figure.” This went on behind a faultless
coiffure and an expression almost classical in its detachment; but if
Miss Milburn could have thought on a level with her looks I, for one,
would hesitate to take any liberty with her meditations.

However, the bell began to ring with the briefest intermissions, the
maid in the cap to make constant journeys. She opened the door with a
welcoming smile, having practically no deportment to go with the cap:
human nature does not freeze readily anywhere. Dora had to leave the
piano: Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen had come she would change
her chair. Fifteen soon came, the young ladies mostly in light silks
or muslins cut square, not low, in the neck, with half-sleeves. This
moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress was more a
matter of material than of cut, a thing in itself symbolical if it were
desirable to consider social evolution here. For middle-aged ladies high
necks and long sleeves were usual; and Mrs Milburn might almost have
been expected to appear thus, in a nicely made black broche, perhaps. It
was recognized as like Mrs Milburn, in keeping with her unbending ideas,
to wear a dress cut as square as any young lady’s, with just a little
lace let in, of a lavender stripe. The young men were nearly all in the
tailor’s convention for their sex the world over, with here and there
a short coat that also went to church; but there some departures from
orthodoxy in the matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were
achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed of defending
them from the charge of being ready-made.

It was a clear, cold January night and everybody, as usual, walked to
the party; the snow creaked and ground underfoot, one could hear the
arriving steps in the drawing-room. They stamped and scraped to get rid
of it in the porch, and hurried through the hall, muffled figures in
overshoes, to emerge from an upstairs bedroom radiant, putting a last
touch to hair and button hole, smelling of the fresh winter air. Such
gatherings usually consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with
one or two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had not yet
changed the plane of existence; married people, by general consent,
left these amusements to the unculled. They had, as I have hinted,
more serious preoccupations, “something else to do”; nobody thought of
inviting them. Nobody, that is, but Mrs Milburn and a few others of her
way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety in a mixture.
On this occasion she had asked her own clergyman, the pleasant-faced
rector of St Stephen’s, and Mrs Emmett, who wore that pathetic
expression of fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation
at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr Winter had the
distinction of having contested South Fox in the Conservative interest
three time unsuccessfully. Undeterred, he went on contesting things:
invariably beaten, he invariably came up smiling and ready to try
again. His imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost heart or
dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he ever cease to impress
his party as being their most useful and acceptable representative.
His business history was chequered and his exact financial equivalent
uncertain, but he had tremendously the air of a man of affairs; as
the phrase went, he was full of politics, the plain repository of deep
things. He had a shrewd eye, a double chin, and a bluff, crisp, jovial
manner of talking as he lay back in an armchair with his legs crossed
and played with his watch chain, an important way of nodding assent,
a weighty shake of denial. Voting on purely party lines, the town had
later rewarded his invincible expectation by electing him Mayor, and
then provided itself with unlimited entertainment by putting in a
Liberal majority on his council, the reports of the weekly sittings
being constantly considered as good as a cake walk. South Fox, as people
said, was not a healthy locality for Conservatives. Yet Walter Winter
wore a look of remarkable hardiness. He had also tremendously the air
of a dark horse, the result both of natural selection and careful
cultivation. Even his political enemies took it kindly when he “got in”
 for Mayor, and offered him amused congratulations. He made a personal
claim on their cordiality, which was not the least of his political
resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the impression
overflowed the ranks of his own supporters and softened asperity among
his opponents. Illustration lies, at this moment close to us. They had
not been in the same room a quarter of an hour before he was in deep
and affectionate converse with Lorne Murchison, whose party we know,
and whose political weight was increasing, as this influence often does,
with a rapidity out of proportion with his professional and general
significance.

“It’s a pity now,” said Mr Winter, with genial interest, “you can’t get
that Ormiston defence into your own hands. Very useful thing for you.”

The younger man shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. It is one
thing to entertain a private vision and another to see it materialized
on other lips.

“Oh I’d like it well enough,” he said, “but it’s out of the question, of
course. I’m too small potatoes.”

“There’s a lot of feeling for old Ormiston. Folks out there on the
Reserve don’t know how to show it enough.”

“They’ve shown it a great deal too much. We don’t want to win on
‘feeling,’ or have it said either. And we were as near as possible
having to take the case to the Hamilton Assizes.”

“I guess you were--I guess you were.” Mr Winter’s suddenly increased
gravity expressed his appreciation of the danger. “I saw Lister of the
Bank the day they heard from Toronto--rule refused. Never saw a man more
put out. Seems they considered the thing as good as settled. General
opinion was it would go to Hamilton, sure. Well I don’t know how you
pulled it off, but it was a smart piece of work, sir.”

Lorne encountered Mr Winter’s frank smile with an expression of crude
and rather stolid discomfort. It had a base of indignation, corrected by
a concession to the common idea that most events, with an issue pendent,
were the result of a smart piece of work: a kind of awkward shrug was in
it. He had no desire to be unpleasant to Walter Winter--on the contrary.
Nevertheless, an uncompromising line came on each side of his mouth with
his reply.

“As far as I know,” he said, “the application was dismissed on its
demerits.”

“Of course it was,” said Mr Winter good-humouredly. “You don’t need to
tell me that. Well, now, this looks like dancing. Miss Filkin, I see, is
going to oblige on the piano. Now I wonder whether I’m going to get Miss
Dora to give me a waltz or not.”

Chairs and table were in effect being pushed back, and folding doors
opened which disclosed another room prepared for this relaxation. Miss
Filkin began to oblige vigorously on the piano, Miss Dora granted Mr
Winter’s request, which he made with elaborate humour as an impudent old
bachelor whom “the boys” would presently take outside and kill. Lorne
watched him make it, envying him his assurance; and Miss Milburn was
aware that he watched and aware that he envied. The room filled with
gaiety and movement: Mr Milburn, sidling dramatically along the wall to
escape the rotatory couples, admonished Mr Murchison to get a partner.
He withdrew himself from the observation of Miss Dora and Mr Winter, and
approached a young lady on a sofa, who said “With very great pleasure.”
 When the dance was over he re-established the young lady on the sofa
and fanned her with energy. Looking across the room, he saw that
Walter Winter, seated beside Dora, was fanning himself. He thought
it disgusting and, for some reason which he did not pause to explore,
exactly like Winter. He had met Miss Milburn once or twice before
without seeing her in any special way: here, at home, the centre of the
little conventions that at once protected and revealed her, conventions
bound up in the impressive figures of her mother and her aunt, she had
a new interest, and all the attraction of that which is not easily come
by. It is also possible that although Lorne had met her before, she
had not met him; she was meeting him now for the first time, as she
sat directly opposite and talked very gracefully to Walter Winter.
Addressing Walter Winter, Lorne was the object of her pretty remarks.
While Mr Winter had her superficial attention, he was the bland medium
which handed her on. Her consciousness was fixed on young Mr Murchison,
quite occupied with him: she could not imagine why they had not asked
him long ago; he wasn’t exactly “swell,” but you could see he was
somebody. So already she figured the potential distinction in the set
of his shoulders and the carriage of his head. It might have been
translated in simple terms of integrity and force by anyone who looked
for those things. Miss Milburn was incapable of such detail, but she saw
truly enough in the mass.

Lorne, on the opposite sofa, looked at her across the town’s traditions
of Milburn exclusiveness. Oddly enough, at this moment when he might
have considered that he had overcome them, they seemed to gather force,
exactly in his line of vision. He had never before been so near Dora
Milburn, and he had never before perceived her so remote. He had a sense
of her distance beyond those few yards of carpet quite incompatible
with the fact. It weighed upon him, but until she sent him a sudden
unexpected smile he did not know how heavily. It was a dissipating
smile; nothing remained before it. Lorne carefully restored his
partner’s fan, bowed before her, and went straight across the room.



CHAPTER VII

It is determined with something like humour that communities very young
should occupy themselves almost altogether with matters of grave and
serious import. The vision of life at that period is no doubt unimpeded
and clear; its conditions offer themselves with a certain nakedness and
force, both as to this world and to that which is to come. The town of
Elgin thus knew two controlling interests--the interest of politics
and the interest of religion. Both are terms we must nevertheless
circumscribe. Politics wore a complexion strictly local, provincial,
or Dominion. The last step of France in Siam, the disputed influence of
Germany in the Persian Gulf, the struggle of the Powers in China were
not matters greatly talked over in Elgin; the theatre of European
diplomacy had no absorbed spectators here. Nor can I claim that interest
in the affairs of Great Britain was in any way extravagant.

A sentiment of affection for the reigning house certainly prevailed. It
was arbitrary, rococo, unrelated to current conditions as a tradition
sung down in a ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through
long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it--when you consider,
beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding
the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here
were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry,
no blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an occasional
telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an event of public
importance, a suitable emotion. Yet the common love for the throne
amounted to a half-ashamed enthusiasm that burned with something like
a sacred flame, and was among the things not ordinarily alluded to,
because of the shyness that attaches to all feeling that cannot be
justified in plain terms. A sentiment of affection for the reigning
house certainly prevailed; but it was a thing by itself. The fall of
a British Government would hardly fail to excite comment, and the
retirement of a Prime Minister would induce both the Mercury and the
Express to publish a biographical sketch of him, considerably shorter
than the leader embodying the editor’s views as to who should get
the electric light contract. But the Government might become the sole
employer of labour in those islands, Church and school might part
company for ever, landlords might be deprived of all but compassionate
allowances and, except for the degree of extravagance involved in these
propositions, they would hardly be current in Elgin. The complications
of England’s foreign policy were less significant still. It was
recognized dimly that England had a foreign policy, more or less had
to have it, as they would have said in Elgin; it was part of the huge
unnecessary scheme of things for which she was responsible--unnecessary
from Elgin’s point of view as a father’s financial obligations might be
to a child he had parted with at birth. It all lay outside the facts
of life, far beyond the actual horizon, like the affairs of a distant
relation from whom one has nothing to hope, not even personal contact,
and of whose wealth and greatness one does not boast much, because of
the irony involved. Information upon all these matters was duly put
before Elgin every morning in the telegrams of the Toronto papers; the
information came, until the other day, over cables to New York and was
disseminated by American news agencies. It was, therefore, not devoid of
bias; but if this was perceived it was by no means thought a matter
for protesting measures, especially as they would be bound to involve
expense. The injury was too vague, too remote, to be more than sturdily
discounted by a mental attitude. Belief in England was in the blood,
it would not yield to the temporary distortion of facts in the
newspapers--at all events, it would not yield with a rush. Whether there
was any chance of insidious sapping was precisely what the country was
too indifferent to discover. Indifferent, apathetic, self-centred--until
whenever, down the wind, across the Atlantic, came the faint far music
of the call to arms. Then the old dog of war that has his kennel in
every man rose and shook himself, and presently there would be a
baying! The sense of kinship, lying too deep for the touch of ordinary
circumstance, quickened to that; and in a moment “we” were fighting,
“we” had lost or won.

Apart, however, from the extraordinary, the politics of Elgin’s daily
absorption were those of the town, the Province, the Dominion. Centres
of small circumference yield a quick swing; the concern of the average
intelligent Englishman as to the consolidation of his country’s
interests in the Yangtse Valley would be a languid manifestation beside
that of an Elgin elector in the chances of an appropriation for a
new court house. The single mind is the most fervid: Elgin had few
distractions from the question of the court house or the branch line
to Clayfield. The arts conspired to be absent; letters resided at the
nearest university city; science was imported as required, in practical
improvements. There was nothing, indeed, to interfere with Elgin’s
attention to the immediate, the vital, the municipal: one might almost
read this concentration of interest in the white dust of the rambling
streets, and the shutters closed against it. Like other movements of the
single mind, it had something of the ferocious, of the inflexible, of
the unintelligent; but it proudly wore the character of the go-ahead
and, as Walter Winter would have pointed out to you, it had granted
eleven bonuses to “capture” sound commercial concerns in six years.

In wholesome fear of mistake, one would hesitate to put church matters
either before or after politics among the preoccupations of Elgin. It
would be safer and more indisputable to say that nothing compared with
religion but politics, and nothing compared with politics but religion.
In offering this proposition also we must think of our dimensions. There
is a religious fervour in Oxford, in Mecca, in Benares, and the sign
for these ideas is the same; we have to apply ourselves to the
interpretation. In Elgin religious fervour was not beautiful, or
dramatic, or self-immolating; it was reasonable. You were perhaps
your own first creditor; after that your debt was to your Maker. You
discharged this obligation in a spirit of sturdy equity: if the children
didn’t go to Sunday school you knew the reason why. The habit of church
attendance was not only a basis of respectability, but practically the
only one: a person who was “never known to put his head inside a church
door” could not be more severely reprobated, by Mrs Murchison at all
events. It was the normal thing, the thing which formed the backbone of
life, sustaining to the serious, impressive to the light, indispensable
to the rest, and the thing that was more than any of these, which you
can only know when you stand in the churches among the congregations.
Within its prescribed limitations it was for many the intellectual
exercise, for more the emotional lift, and for all the unfailing
distraction of the week. The repressed magnetic excitement in gatherings
of familiar faces, fellow-beings bound by the same convention to the
same kind of behaviour, is precious in communities where the human
interest is still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it
produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the case, in Dr
Drummond’s church, of placid-faced, saintly old Sandy MacQuhot, the
epileptic. It used to be a common regret with Lorne Murchison that as
sure as he was allowed to stay away from church Sandy would have a
fit. That was his little boy’s honesty; the elders enjoyed the fit and
deprecated the disturbance.

There was a simple and definite family feeling within communions. “They
come to our church” was the argument of first force whether for calling
or for charity. It was impossible to feel toward a Congregationalist or
an Episcopalian as you felt toward one who sang the same hymns and
sat under the same admonition week by week, year in and year out, as
yourself. “Wesleyans, are they?” a lady of Knox Church would remark of
the newly arrived, in whom her interest was suggested. “Then let the
Wesleyans look after them.” A pew-holder had a distinct status; an
“adherent” enjoyed friendly consideration, especially if he adhered
faithfully; and stray attendants from other congregations were treated
with punctilious hospitality, places being found for them in the Old
Testament, as if they could hardly be expected to discover such things
for themselves. The religious interest had also the strongest domestic
character in quite another sense from that of the family prayers which
Dr Drummond was always enjoying. “Set your own house in order and then
your own church” was a wordless working precept in Elgin. Threadbare
carpet in the aisles was almost as personal a reproach as a hole
under the dining-room table; and self-respect was barely possible to a
congregation that sat in faded pews. The minister’s gown even was the
subject of scrutiny as the years went on. It was an expensive thing to
buy, but an oyster supper would do it and leave something over for the
organ. Which brings us to the very core and centre of these activities,
their pivot, their focus and, in a human sense, their inspiration--the
minister himself.

The minister was curiously special among a people so general; he was in
a manner raised in life on weekdays as he was in the pulpit on Sundays.
He had what one might call prestige; some form of authority still
survived in his person, to which the spiritual democracy he presided
over gave a humorous, voluntary assent. He was supposed to be a person
of undetermined leisure--what was writing two sermons a week to earn
your living by?--and he was probably the more reverend, or the more
revered, from the fact that he was in the house all day. A particular
importance attached to everything he said and did; he was a person whose
life answered different springs, and was sustained on quite another
principle than that of supply and demand. The province of public
criticism was his; but his people made up for the meekness with which
they sat under it by a generous use of the corresponding privilege in
private. Comments upon the minister partook of hardiness; it was as
if the members were determined to live up to the fact that the
office-bearers could reduce his salary if they liked. Needless to say,
they never did like. Congregations stood loyally by their pastors, and
discussion was strictly intramural. If the Methodists handed theirs on
at the end of three years with a breath of relief, they exhaled it
among themselves; after all, for them it was a matter of luck. The
Presbyterians, as in the case of old Mr Jamesion of St Andrew’s, held
on till death, pulling a long upper lip: election was not a thing to be
trifled with in heaven or upon earth.

It will be imagined whether Dr Drummond did not see in these conditions
his natural and wholesome element, whether he did not fit exactly in.
The God he loved to worship as Jehovah had made him a beneficent despot
and given him, as it were, a commission. If the temporal power had
charged him to rule an eastern province, he would have brought much the
same qualities to the task. Knox Church, Elgin, was his dominion, its
moral and material affairs his jealous interest, and its legitimate
expansion his chief pride. In “anniversary” sermons, which he always
announced the Sunday before, he seldom refrained from contrasting
the number on the roll of church membership, then and now, with the
particular increase in the year just closed. If the increase
was satisfactory, he made little comment beyond the duty of
thanksgiving--figures spoke for themselves. If it was otherwise Dr
Drummond’s displeasure was not a thing he would conceal. He would wing
it eloquently on the shaft of his grief that the harvest had been so
light; but he would more than hint the possibility that the labourers
had been few. Most important among his statistics was the number of
young communicants. Wanderers from other folds he admitted, with a
not wholly satisfied eye upon their early theological training, and to
persons duly accredited from Presbyterian churches elsewhere he gave the
right hand of fellowship; but the young people of his own congregation
were his chief concern always, and if a gratifying number of these had
failed to “come forward” during the year, the responsibility must
lie somewhere. Dr Drummond was willing to take his own share; “the
ministrations of this pulpit” would be more than suspected of having
come short, and the admission would enable him to tax the rest upon
parents and Bible-class teachers with searching effect. The congregation
would go gloomily home to dinner, and old Sandy MacQuhot would remark
to his wife, “It’s hard to say why will the Doctor get himself in sic
a state aboot mere numbers. We’re told ‘where two or three are gathered
together.’ But the Doctor’s all for a grand congregation.”

Knox Church, under such auspices could hardly fail to enlarge her
borders; but Elgin enlarged hers faster. Almost before you knew where
you were there spread out the district of East Elgin, all stacks of tall
chimneys and rows of little houses. East Elgin was not an attractive
locality; it suffered from inundation sometimes, when the river was in
spring flood; it gave unresentful room to a tannery. It was the home of
dubious practices at the polls, and the invariable hunting-ground for
domestic servants. Nevertheless, in the view of Knox Church, it could
not bear a character wholly degraded; too many Presbyterians, Scotch
foremen, and others, had their respectable residence there. For these it
was a far cry to Dr Drummond in bad weather, and there began to be talk
of hiring the East Elgin schoolhouse for Sunday exercises if suitable
persons could be got to come over from Knox Church and lead them. I do
not know who was found to broach the matter to Dr Drummond; report says
his relative and housekeeper, Mrs Forsyth, who perhaps might do it under
circumstances of strategical advantage. Mrs Forsyth, or whoever it was,
had her reply in the hidden terms of an equation--was it any farther for
the people of East Elgin to walk to hear him preach than for him to walk
to minister to the people of East Elgin, which he did quite once a week,
and if so, how much? Mrs Forsyth, or whoever it was, might eliminate
the unknown quantity. It cannot be said that Dr Drummond discouraged the
project; he simply did not mention it and as it was known to have been
communicated to him this represented effectively the policy of the
closed door. He found himself even oftener in East Elgin, walking about
on his pastoral errands with a fierce briskness of aspect and a sharp
inquiring eye, before which one might say the proposition slunk
away. Meanwhile, the Methodists who, it seemed, could tolerate
decentralization, or anything short of round dances, opened a chapel
with a cheerful sociable, and popularized the practice of backsliding
among those for whom the position was theologically impossible. Good
Presbyterians in East Elgin began to turn into makeshift Methodists. The
Doctor missed certain occupants of the gallery seats and felt the logic
of circumstances. Here we must all yield, and the minister concealed
his discomfiture in a masterly initiative. The matter came up again at
a meeting of the church managers, brought up by Dr Drummond, who had
the satisfaction of hearing that a thing put into the Doctor’s hands was
already half done. In a very few weeks it was entirely done. The use
of the schoolhouse was granted through Dr Drummond’s influence with the
Board free of charge; and to understand the triumph of this it should be
taken into account that three of the trustees were Wesleyans. Services
were held regularly, certain of Dr Drummond’s elders officiating; and
the conventicle in the schoolhouse speedily became known as Knox Church
Mission. It grew and prospered. The first night “I to the hills will
lift mine eyes” went up from East Elgin on the uplifting tune that
belongs to it, the strayed came flocking back.

This kind never go forth again; once they refind the ark of the covenant
there they abide. In the course of time it became a question of a better
one, and money was raised locally to build it. Dr Drummond pronounced
the first benediction in Knox Mission Church, and waited, well knowing
human nature in its Presbyterian aspect, for the next development. It
came, and not later than he anticipated, in the form of a prayer to Knox
Church for help to obtain the services of a regularly ordained minister.
Dr Drummond had his guns ready: he opposed the application; where a
regularly ordained minister was already at the disposal of those who
chose to walk a mile and a half to hear him, the luxury of more locally
consecrated services should be at the charge of the locality. He himself
was willing to spend and be spent in the spiritual interests of East
Elgin; that was abundantly proven; what he could not comfortably
tolerate was the deviation of congregational funds, the very blood of
the body of belief, into other than legitimate channels. He fought
for his view with all his tactician’s resources, putting up one
office-bearer after another to endorse it but the matter was decided at
the general yearly meeting of the congregation; and the occasion showed
Knox Church in singular sympathy with its struggling offspring. Dr
Drummond for the first time in his ministry, was defeated by his people.
It was less a defeat than a defence, an unexpected rally round the
corporate right to direct corporate activities; and the congregation was
so anxious to wound the minister’s feelings as little as possible that
the grant in aid of the East Elgin Mission was embodied in a motion to
increase Dr Drummond’s salary by two hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The Doctor with a wry joke, swallowed his gilded pill, but no coating
could dissimulate its bitterness, and his chagrin was plain for long.
The issue with which we are immediately concerned is that three months
later Knox Church Mission called to minister to it the Reverend Hugh
Finlay, a young man from Dumfriesshire and not long out. Dr Drummond had
known beforehand what their choice would be. He had brought Mr Finlay to
occupy Knox Church pulpit during his last July and August vacation,
and Mrs Forsyth had reported that such midsummer congregations she
had simply never worshipped with. Mrs Forsyth was an excellent hand at
pressed tongue and a wonder at knitted counterpanes, but she had not
acquired tact and never would.



CHAPTER VIII

The suggestion that the Reverend Hugh Finlay preached from the pulpit
of Knox Church “better sermons” than its permanent occupant, would have
been justly considered absurd, and nobody pronounced it. The church was
full, as Mrs Forsyth observed, on these occasions; but there were many
other ways of accounting for that. The Murchisons, as a family, would
have been the last to make such an admission. The regular attendance
might have been, as much as anything, out of deference to the wishes
of the Doctor himself, who invariably and sternly hoped, in his last
sermon, that no stranger occupying his place would have to preach to
empty pews. He was thinking, of course, of old Mr Jamieson with whom he
occasionally exchanged and whose effect on the attendance had not failed
to reach him. With regard to Mr Jamieson he was compelled, in the end,
to resort to tactics: he omitted to announce the Sunday before that his
venerable neighbour would preach, and the congregation, outwitted,
had no resource but to sustain the beard-wagging old gentleman through
seventhly to the finish. There came a time when the dear human Doctor
also omitted to announce that Mr Finlay would preach, but for other
reasons, meanwhile, as Mrs Forsyth said, he had no difficulty in
conjuring a vacation congregation for his young substitute. They
came trooping, old and young. Mr and Mrs Murchison would survey their
creditable family rank with a secret compunction, remembering its
invariable gaps at other times, and then resolutely turn to the praise
of God with the reflection that one means to righteousness was as
blessed as another. They themselves never missed a Sunday, and as seldom
failed to remark on the way back that it was all very interesting, but
Mr Finlay couldn’t drive it home like the Doctor. There were times,
sparse and special occasions, when the Doctor himself made one of the
congregation. Then he would lean back luxuriously in the corner of
his own pew, his wiry little form half-lost in the upholstery his
arms folded, his knees crossed, his face all humorous indulgence; yes,
humorous. At the announcement of the text a twinkle would lodge in the
shrewd grey eyes and a smile but half-suppressed would settle about the
corners of the flexible mouth: he knew what the young fellow there would
be at. And as the young fellow proceeded, his points would be weighed to
the accompaniment of the Doctor’s pendent foot, which moved perpetually,
judiciously; while the smile sometimes deepened, sometimes lapsed, since
there were moments when any young fellow had to be taken seriously.
It was an attitude which only the Doctor was privileged to adopt thus
outwardly; but in private it was imitated all up and down the aisles,
where responsible heads of families sat considering the quality of the
manna that was offered them. When it fell from the lips of Mr Finlay the
verdict was, upon the whole, very favourable, as long as there was no
question of comparison with the Doctor.

There could be, indeed, very little question of such comparison. There
was a generation between them and a school, and to that you had to add
every set and cast of mind and body that can make men different. Dr
Drummond, in faith and practice, moved with precision along formal and
implicit lines; his orbit was established, and his operation within
it as unquestionable as the simplest exhibit of nature. He took in a
wonderful degree the stamp of the teaching of his adolescent period; not
a line was missing nor a precept; nor was the mould defaced by a single
wavering tendency of later date. Religious doctrine was to him a thing
for ever accomplished, to be accepted or rejected as a whole. He taught
eternal punishment and retribution, reconciling both with Divine love
and mercy; he liked to defeat the infidel with the crashing question,
“Who then was the architect of the Universe?” The celebrated among such
persons he pursued to their deathbeds; Voltaire and Rousseau owed their
reputation, with many persons in Knox Church, to their last moments and
to Dr Drummond. He had a triumphant invective which drew the mind from
chasms in logic, and a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when
he quoted great lines, from everything else. He loved the euphony of the
Old Testament; his sonorous delivery would lift a chapter from Isaiah to
the height of ritual, and every Psalm he read was a Magnificat whether
he would or no. The warrior in him was happy among the Princes of
Issachar; and the parallels he would find for modern events in the
annals of Judah and of Israel were astounding. Yet he kept a sharp eye
upon the daily paper, and his reference to current events would often
give his listeners an audacious sense of up-to-dateness which might have
been easily discounted by the argument they illustrated. The survivors
of a convulsion of nature, for instance, might have learned from his
lips the cause and kind of their disaster traced back forcibly to
local acquiescence in iniquity, and drawn unflinchingly from the text,
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” The militant history
of his Church was a passion with him; if ever he had to countenance
canonization he would have led off with Jenny Geddes. “A tremendous
Presbyterian” they called him in the town. To hear him give out a single
psalm, and sing it with his people, would convince anybody of that.
There was a choir, of course, but to the front pews, at all events, Dr
Drummond’s leading was more important than the choir’s. It was a note
of dauntless vigour, and it was plain by the regular forward jerk of his
surpliced shoulder that his foot was keeping time:

   Where the assemblies of the just
   And congregations are.

You could not help admiring, and you could not help respecting; you
were compelled by his natural force and his unqualified conviction, his
tireless energy and his sterling sort.

It is possible to understand, however, that after sitting for
twenty-five years under direction so unfailing and so uncompromising,
the congregation of Knox Church might turn with a moderate curiosity
to the spiritual indications of the Reverend Hugh Finlay. He was a
passionate romantic, and his body had shot up into a fitting temple for
such an inhabitant as his soul. He was a great long fellow, with a shock
of black hair and deep dreams in his eyes; his head was what people
called a type, a type I suppose of the simple motive and the noble
intention, the detached point of view and the somewhat indifferent
attitude to material things, as it may be humanly featured anywhere. His
face bore a confusion of ideals; he had the brow of a Covenanter and
the mouth of Adonais, the flame of religious ardour in his eyes and the
composure of perceived philosophy on his lips. He was fettered by an
impenetrable shyness; it was in the pulpit alone that he could expand,
and then only upon written lines, with hardly a gesture, and the most
perfunctory glances, at conscientious intervals, toward his hearers.
A poor creature, indeed, in this respect, Dr Drummond thought him--Dr
Drummond, who wore an untrammelled surplice which filled like an
agitated sail in his quick tacks from right to left. “The man loses half
his points,” said Dr Drummond. I doubt whether he did, people followed
so closely, though Sandy MacQuhot was of the general opinion when he
said that it would do nobody any harm if Mr Finlay would lift his head
oftener from the book.

Advena Murchison thought him the probable antitype of an Oxford don. She
had never seen an Oxford don, but Mr Finlay wore the characteristics
these schoolmen were dressed in by novelists; and Advena noted with
delight the ingenuity of fate in casting such a person into the pulpit
of the Presbyterian Church in a young country. She had her perception of
comedy in life; till Finlay came she had found nothing so interesting.
With his arrival, however, other preoccupations fell into their proper
places.

Finlay, indeed, it may be confessed at once, he and not his message was
her engrossment from the beginning. The message she took with reverent
gentleness; but her passionate interest was for the nature upon which
it travelled, and never for the briefest instant did she confuse these
emotions. Those who write, we are told transcribe themselves in spite
of themselves; it is more true of those who preach, for they are also
candid by profession, and when they are not there is the eye and the
voice to help to betray them. Hugh Finlay, in the pulpit, made himself
manifest in all the things that matter to Advena Murchison in the pew;
and from the pew to the pulpit her love went back with certainty, clear
in its authority and worshipping the ground of its justification. When
she bowed her head it was he whom she heard in the language of his
invocations; his doctrine rode, for her, on a spirit of wide and sweet
philosophy; in his contemplation of the Deity she saw the man. He had
those lips at once mobile, governed and patient, upon which genius
chooses oftenest to rest. As to this, Advena’s convictions were so
private as to be hidden from herself; she never admitted that she
thought Finlay had it, and in the supreme difficulty of proving anything
else we may wisely accept her view. But he had something, the subtle
Celt; he had horizons, lifted lines beyond the common vision, and an eye
rapt and a heart intrepid; and though for a long time he was unconscious
of it, he must have adventured there with a happier confidence because
of her companionship.

From the first Advena knew no faltering or fluttering, none of the baser
nervous betrayals. It was all one great delight to her, her discovery
and her knowledge and her love for him. It came to her almost in a
logical development; it found her grave, calm, and receptive. She had
even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to
everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive
with her in such a glorious defensible, demonstrable sequence. Toward
him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved and he was
unaware. She watched his academic awkwardness in church with the inward
tender smile of the eternal habile feminine, and when they met she could
have laughed and wept over his straightened sentences and his difficult
manner, knowing how little significant they were. With his eyes upon her
and his words offered to her intelligence, she found herself treating
his shy formality as the convention it was, a kind of make-believe which
she would politely and kindly play up to until he should happily forget
it and they could enter upon simpler relations. She had to play up to it
for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient;
and of course the day came when she had her reward. Knowing him as she
did, she remembered the day and the difference it made.

It was toward the end of an afternoon in early April; the discoloured
snow still lay huddled in the bleaker fence corners. Wide puddles stood
along the roadsides, reflecting the twigs and branches of the naked
maples; last year’s leaves were thick and wet underfoot, and a soft damp
wind was blowing. Advena was on her way home and Finlay overtook her.
He passed her at first, with a hurried silent lifting of his hat; then
perhaps the deserted street gave a suggestion of unfriendliness to his
act, or some freshness in her voice stayed him. At all events, he
waited and joined her, with a word or two about their going in the
same direction; and they walked along together. He offered her his
companionship, but he had nothing to say; the silence in which they
pursued their way was no doubt to him just the embarrassing condition he
usually had to contend with. To her it seemed pregnant, auspicious; it
drew something from the low grey lights of the wet spring afternoon and
the unbound heart-lifting wind; she had a passionate prevision that the
steps they took together would lead somehow to freedom. They went on in
that strange bound way, and the day drew away from them till they turned
a sudden corner, when it lay all along the yellow sky across the river,
behind a fringe of winter woods, stayed in the moment of its retreat on
the edge of unvexed landscape. They stopped involuntarily to look, and
she saw a smile come up from some depth in him.

“Ah, well,” he said, as if to himself, “it’s something to be in a
country where the sun still goes down with a thought of the primaeval.”

“I think I prefer the sophistication of chimney-pots,” she replied.
“I’ve always longed to see a sunset in London, with the fog breaking
over Westminster.”

“Then you don’t care about them for themselves, sunsets?” he asked, with
the simplest absence of mind.

“I never yet could see the sun go down, But I was angry in my heart,”
 she said, and this time he looked at her.

“How does it go on?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Only those two lines stay with me. I feel it that
way, too. It’s the seal upon an act of violence, isn’t it, a sunset?
Something taken from us against our will. It’s a hateful reminder, in
the midst of our delightful volitions, of how arbitrary every condition
of life is.”

“The conditions of business are always arbitrary. Life is a business--we
have to work at ourselves till it is over. So much cut off and ended it
is,” he said, glancing at the sky again. “If space is the area of life
and time is its opportunity, there goes a measure of opportunity.”

“I wonder,” said Advena, “where it goes?”

“Into the void behind time?” he suggested, smiling straight at her.

“Into the texture of the future,” she answered, smiling back.

“We might bring it to bear very intelligently on the future, at any
rate,” he returned. “The world is wrapped in destiny, and but revolves
to roll it out.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said curiously.

“No you couldn’t,” he laughed outright. “I haven’t thought it good
enough to publish.”

“And it isn’t the sort of thing,” she ventured gaily, “you could put in
a sermon.”

“No, it isn’t.” They came to a corner of the street which led to Mr
Finlay’s boarding-house. It stretched narrowly to the north and there
was a good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for
a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it which was simply the joy of
his sudden liberation with her consciously pushing away the moment of
parting; and Finlay’s eyes rested once again on the evening sky beyond
the river.

“I believe you are right and I am a moralizer,” he said. “There IS
pain over there. One thinks a sunset beautiful and impressive, but one
doesn’t look at it long.”

Then they separated, and he took the road to the north, which was still
snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow west, with the odd
sweet illusion that a summer day was dawning.



CHAPTER IX

The office of Messrs Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was in Market Street,
exactly over Scott’s drug store. Scott with his globular blue and red
and green vessels in the window and his soda-water fountain inside; was
on the ground floor; the passage leading upstairs separated him from
Mickie, boots and shoes; and beyond Mickie, Elgin’s leading tobacconist
shared his place of business with a barber. The last two contributed
most to the gaiety of Market Street: the barber with the ribanded pole,
which stuck out at an angle; the tobacconist with a nobly featured squaw
in chocolate effigy who held her draperies under her chin with one hand
and outstretched a packet of cigars with the other.

The passage staircase between Scott’s and Mickie’s had a hardened look,
and bore witness to the habit of expectoration; ladies, going up to Dr
Simmons, held their skirts up and the corners of their mouths down. Dr
Simmons was the dentist: you turned to the right. The passage itself
turned to the left, and after passing two doors bearing the law firm’s
designation in black letters on ground glass, it conducted you with
abruptness to the office of a bicycle agent, and left you there.
For greater emphasis the name of the firm of Messrs Fulke, Warner &
Murchison was painted on the windows also; it could be seen from any
part of the market square, which lay, with the town hall in the middle,
immediately below. During four days in the week the market square was
empty. Odds and ends of straw and paper blew about it; an occasional
pedestrian crossed it diagonally for the short cut to the post-office;
the town hall rose in the middle, and defied you to take your mind off
the ugliness of municipal institutions. On the other days it was a scene
of activity. Farmers’ wagons, with the shafts turned in were ranged
round three sides of it; on a big day they would form into parallel
lanes and cut the square into sections as well. The produce of all Fox
County filled the wagons, varying agreeably as the year went round.
Bags of potatoes leaned against the sidewalk, apples brimmed in bushel
measures, ducks dropped their twisted necks over the cart wheels; the
town hall, in this play of colour, stood redeemed. The produce was
mostly left to the women to sell. On the fourth side of the square
loads of hay and cordwood demanded the master mind, but small matters of
fruit, vegetables, and poultry submitted to feminine judgement. The men
“unhitched,” and went away on their own business; it was the wives you
accosted, as they sat in the middle, with their knees drawn up and their
skirts tucked close, vigilant in rusty bonnets, if you wished to buy.
Among them circulated the housewives of Elgin, pricing and comparing and
acquiring; you could see it all from Dr Simmons’s window, sitting in
his chair that screwed up and down. There was a little difficulty always
about getting things home; only very ordinary people carried their own
marketing. Trifling articles, like eggs or radishes, might be smuggled
into a brown wicker basket with covers; but it did not consort with
elegance to “trapes” home with anything that looked inconvenient or had
legs sticking out of it. So that arrangements of mutual obligation had
to be made: the good woman from whom Mrs Jones had bought her tomatoes
would take charge of the spring chickens Mrs Jones had bought from
another good woman just as soon as not, and deliver them at Mrs Jones’s
residence, as under any circumstances she was “going round that way.”

It was a scene of activity but not of excitement, or in any sense of
joy. The matter was too hard an importance; it made too much difference
on both sides whether potatoes were twelve or fifteen cents a peck.
The dealers were laconic and the buyers anxious; country neighbours
exchanged the time of day, but under the pressure of affairs. Now and
then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip with another; the countrywomen
looked on, curious, grim, and a little contemptuous of so much
demonstration and so many words. Life on an Elgin market day was a
serious presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when it rained
or snowed the aesthetic seemed a wholly unjustifiable point of view.
It was not misery, it was even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the
margin was small and the struggle plain. Plain, too, it was that here
was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken ground of dramatic
promise, but a narrow inheritance of the opportunity to live which
generations had grasped before. There were bones in the village
graveyards of Fox County to father all these sharp features; Elgin
market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County and, in little,
the history of the whole Province. The heart of it was there, the
enduring heart of the new country already old in acquiescence. It was
the deep root of the race in the land, twisted and unlovely, but holding
the promise of all. Something like that Lorne Murchison felt about it as
he stood for a moment in the passage I have mentioned and looked across
the road. The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in
gayer spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously equal to
what he had to do, on days when the square was full than on days when
it was empty. This morning he had an elation of his own; it touched
everything with more vivid reality. The familiar picture stirred a joy
in him in tune with his private happiness; its undernote came to him
with a pang as keen. The sense of kinship surged in his heart; these
were his people, this his lot as well as theirs. For the first time he
saw it in detachment. Till now he had regarded it with the friendly eyes
of a participator who looked no further. Today he did look further: the
whole world invited his eyes, offering him a great piece of luck to look
through. The opportunity was in his hand which, if he could seize and
hold, would lift and carry him on. He was as much aware of its potential
significance as anyone could be, and what leapt in his veins till
he could have laughed aloud was the splendid conviction of resource.
Already in the door of the passage he had achieved, from that point he
looked at the scene before him with an impulse of loyalty and devotion.
A tenderness seized him for the farmers of Fox County, a throb of
enthusiasm for the idea they represented, which had become for
him suddenly moving and pictorial. At that moment his country came
subjectively into his possession; great and helpless it came into his
inheritance as it comes into the inheritance of every man who can take
it, by deed of imagination and energy and love. He held this microcosm
of it, as one might say, in his hand and looked at it ardently; then he
took his way across the road.

A tall thickly built young fellow detached himself from a group, smiling
broadly at the sight of Murchison, and started to meet him.

“Hello, Lorne,” he said. He had smiled all the way anticipating the
encounter. He was obviously in clothes which he did not put on every
day, but the seriousness of this was counteracted by his hard felt hat,
which he wore at an angle that disregarded convention.

“Hello, Elmore! You back?”

“That’s about it.”

“You don’t say! Back to stay?”

“Far’s I can see. Young Alf’s made up his mind to learn the dentist
business, and the old folks are backin’ him; so I don’t see but I’ve got
to stop on and run the show. Father’s gettin’ up in years now.”

“Why, yes. I suppose he must be. It’s a good while since you went West.
Well, what sort of a country have they got out Swan River way? Booming
right along?”

“Boom nothing. I don’t mean to say there’s anything the matter with
the country; there ain’t; but you’ve got to get up just as early in
the mornings out there as y’do anywhere, far’s I noticed. An’ it’s a
lonesome life. Now I AM back I don’t know but little old Ontario’s good
enough for me. ‘N I hear you’ve taken up the law, Lorne. Y’always had a
partiality for it, d’y’ remember, up there to the Collegiate? I used to
think it’d be fine to travel with samples, those days. But you were dead
gone on the law. ‘N by all reports it pans out pretty well don’t it?”

The young men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together.
Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him
for the town’s essential stamp, made by contrast, as he threaded the
desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the
formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration. The
values of carriage and of clothes are relative: in Fifth Avenue Lorne
would have looked countrified, in Piccadilly colonial. Districts are
imaginable, perhaps not in this world, where the frequenters of even
those fashionable thoroughfares would attract glances of curiosity
by their failure to achieve the common standard in such things. Lorne
Murchison, to dismiss the matter, was well up to the standard of Elgin,
though he wore his straw hat quite on the back of his head and buried
both hands in his trousers pockets. His eye was full of pleasant easy
familiarity with the things he saw, and ready to see larger things; it
had that beam of active inquiry, curious but never amazed that marks
the man likely to expand his horizons. Meanwhile he was on capital terms
with his little world, which seemed to take pleasure in hailing him by
his Christian name; even morose Jim Webster, who had failed three times
in groceries, said “Morning, Lorne” with a look of toleration. He moved
alertly; the poise of his head was sanguine; the sun shone on him; the
timidest soul came nearer to him. He and Elmore Crow, who walked beside
him, had gone through the lower forms of the Elgin Collegiate Institute
together, that really “public” kind of school which has so much to do
with reassorting the classes of a new country. The Collegiate Institute
took in raw material and turned out teachers, more teachers than
anything. The teachers taught, chiefly in rural districts where they
could save money, and with the money they saved changed themselves into
doctors, Fellows of the University, mining engineers. The Collegiate
Institute was a potential melting-pot: you went in as your simple
opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what
was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same
as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful
a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too
hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be
reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character
in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that inherited;
it sometimes reveals surprises. Neither Lorne Murchison nor Elmore Crow
illustrates this point very nearly. Lorne would have gone into the law
in any case, since his father was able to send him, and Elmore would
inevitably have gone back to the crops since he was early defeated by
any other possibility. Nevertheless, as they walk together in my mind
along the Elgin market square, the Elgin Collegiate Institute rises
infallibly behind them, a directing influence and a responsible parent.
Lorne was telling his great news.

“You don’t say!” remarked Elmore in response to it. “Lumbago is it? Pa’s
subject to that too; gets an attack most springs. Mr Fulke’ll have to
lay right up--it’s the only thing.”

“I’m afraid he will. And Warner never appeared in court in his life.”

“What d’ye keep Warner for, then?”

“Oh, he does the conveyancing. He’s a good conveyancer, but he isn’t
any pleader and doesn’t pretend to be. And it’s too late to transfer the
case; nobody could get to the bottom of it as we have in the time. So it
falls on me.”

“Caesar, his ghost! How d’ye feel about it, Lorne? I’d be scared green.
Y’don’t TALK nervous. Now I bet you get there with both feet.”

“I hope to get there,” the young lawyer answered; and as he spoke a
concentration came into his face which drove the elation and everything
else that was boyish out of it. “It’s bigger business than I could have
expected for another five years. I’m sorry for the old man, though--HE’S
nervous, if you like. They can hardly keep him in bed. Isn’t that
somebody beckoning to you?”

Elmore looked everywhere except in the right direction among the carts.
If you had been “to the Collegiate,” relatives among the carts selling
squashes were embarrassing.

“There,” his companion indicated.

“It’s Mother,” replied Mr Crow, with elaborate unconcern; “but I don’t
suppose she’s in anything of a hurry. I’ll just go along with you far’s
the post-office.” He kept his glance carefully from the spot at which
he was signalled, and a hint of copper colour crawled up the back of his
neck.

“Oh, but she is. Come along, Elmore; I can go that way.”

“It’ll be longer for you.”

“Not a bit.” Lorne cast a shrewd glance at his companion. “And as we’re
passing, you might just introduce me to your mother; see?”

“She won’t expect it, Lorne.”

“That’s all right, my son. She won’t refuse to meet a friend of yours.”
 He led the way as he spoke to the point of vantage occupied by Mrs Crow,
followed, with plain reluctance, by her son. She was a frail-looking
old woman, with a knitted shawl pinned tightly across her chest, and her
bonnet, in the course of commercial activity, pushed so far back as to
be almost falling off.

“You might smarten yourself with that change, Elmore,” she addressed
him, ignoring his companion. “There’s folks coming back for it.
Two-dollar bill, wa’n’t it? Fifty cents--seventy-five--dollar’n a half.
That’s a Yankee dime, an’ you kin march straight back with it. They
don’t pass but for nine cents, as you’re old enough to know. Keep
twenty-five cents for your dinner--you’ll get most for the money at the
Barker House--an’ bring me back another quarter. Better go an’ get your
victuals now--it’s gone twelve--while they’re hot.”

Elmore took his instructions without visible demur; and then, as
Lorne had not seen fit to detach himself, performed the ceremony
of introduction. As he performed it he drew one foot back and bowed
himself, which seemed obscurely to facilitate it. The suspicion faded
out of Mrs Crow’s tired old sharp eyes under the formula, and she said
she was pleased to make our friend’s acquaintance.

“Mr Murchison’s changed some since the old days at the Collegiate,”
 Elmore explained, “but he ain’t any different under his coat. He’s
practisin’ the law.”

“Lawyers,” Mrs Crow observed, “are folks I like to keep away from.”

“Quite right, too,” responded Lorne, unabashed. “And so you’ve got my
friend here back on the farm, Mrs Crow?”

“Well, yes, he’s back on the farm, an’ when he’s wore out his Winnipeg
clothes and his big ideas, we’re lookin’ to make him some use.” Mrs
Crow’s intention, though barbed, was humorous, and her son grinned
broadly.

“There’s more money in the law,” he remarked “once you get a start.
Here’s Mr Murchison goin’ to run the Ormiston case; his old man’s down
sick, an’ I guess it depends on Lorne now whether Ormiston gets off or
goes to penitentiary.”

Mrs Crow’s face tied itself up into criticism as she looked our young
man up and down. “Depends upon you, does it?” she commented. “Well, all
I’ve got to say is it’s a mighty young dependence. Coming on next
week, ain’t it? You won’t be much older by then. Yes’m,” she turned to
business, “I don’t say but what it’s high for rhubarb, but there ain’t
another bunch in the market, and won’t be for a week yet.”

Under cover of this discussion Lorne bade the Crows good morning,
retreating in the rear of the lady who found the rhubarb high. Mrs
Crow’s drop of acid combined with his saving sense of the humour of it
to adjust all his courage and his confidence, and with a braver face
than ever he involuntarily hastened his steps to keep pace with his
happy chance.



CHAPTER X

In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing to bound a local
excitement, or to impede its transmission at full value. Elgin was a
manufacturing town in southern Ontario, but they would have known every
development of the Federal Bank case at the North Pole if there had been
anybody there to learn. In Halifax they did know it, and in Vancouver,
B.C., while every hundred miles nearer it warmed as a topic in
proportion. In Montreal the papers gave it headlines; from Toronto they
sent special reporters. Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of
Mr Horace Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins, who held all
the cards in their hands, and played them, it must be said, admirably,
reducing the Mercury to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which
the Express would invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the
following day. It was to the Express that the Toronto reporters came for
details and local colour; and Mr Williams gave them just as much as he
thought they ought to have and no more. It was the Express that managed,
while elaborately abstaining from improper comment upon a matter sub
judice, to feed and support the general conviction of young Ormiston’s
innocence, and thereby win for itself, though a “Grit” paper, wide
reading in that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation, while the
Conservative Mercury, with its reckless sympathy for an old party name,
made itself criminally liable by reviewing cases of hard dealing by
the bank among the farmers, and only escaped prosecution by the amplest
retraction and the most contrite apology. As Mr Williams remarked, there
was no use in dwelling on the unpopularity of the bank, that didn’t need
pointing out; folks down Moneida way could put any newspaper wise on the
number of mortgages foreclosed and the rate for secondary loans exacted
by the bank in those parts. That consideration, no doubt, human nature
being what it is, contributed the active principle to the feeling so
widely aroused by the case. We are not very readily the prey to
emotions of faith in our fellows, especially, perhaps, if we live under
conditions somewhat hard and narrow; the greater animosity behind is,
at all events, valuable to give force and relief and staying power to
a sentiment of generous conviction. But however we may depreciate its
origin, the conviction was there, widespread in the townships: young
Ormiston would “get clear”; the case for the defence might be heard over
every bushel of oats in Elgin market-place.

In Elgin itself opinion was more reserved. There was a general view
that these bank clerks were fast fellows, and a tendency to contrast the
habits and the pay of such dashing young men, an exercise which ended
in a not unnatural query. As to the irritating caste feeling maintained
among them, young Ormiston perhaps gave himself as few airs as any.
He was generally conceded indeed by the judging sex to be “nice to
everybody”; but was not that exactly the nature for which temptations
were most easily spread? The town, moreover, had a sapience of its own.
Was it likely that the bank would bring a case so publicly involving its
character and management without knowing pretty well what it was about?
The town would not be committed beyond the circle of young Ormiston’s
intimate friends, which was naturally small if you compared it with the
public; the town wasn’t going to be surprised at anything that might be
proved. On the other hand, the town was much more vividly touched than
the country by the accident which had made Lorne Murchison practically
sole counsel for the defence, announced as it was by the Express with
every appreciation of its dramatic value. Among what the Express called
“the farming community” this, in so far as it had penetrated, was
regarded as a simple misfortune, a dull blow to expectancy, which
expectancy had some work to survive. Elgin, with its finer palate for
sensation, saw in it heightened chances, both for Lorne and for the
case; and if any ratepayer within its limits had remained indifferent to
the suit, the fact that one side of it had been confided to so young and
so “smart” a fellow townsman would have been bound to draw him into the
circle of speculation. Youth in a young country is a symbol wearing
all its value. It stands not only for what it is. The trick of augury
invests it, at a glance, with the sum of its possibilities, the augurs
all sincere, confident, and exulting. They have been justified so often;
they know, in their wide fair fields of opportunity, just what qualities
will produce what results. There is thus a complacence among adolescent
peoples which is vaguely irritating to their elders; but the greybeards
need not be over-captious; it is only a question of time, pathetically
short-lived in the history of the race. Sanguine persons in Elgin were
freely disposed to “bet on” Lorne Murchison, and there were none
so despondent as to take the view that he would not come out of it,
somehow; with an added personal significance. To make a spoon is a
laudable achievement, but it may be no mean business to spoil a horn.

As the Express put it, there was as little standing room for ladies and
gentlemen in the courthouse the first day of the Spring Assizes as there
was for horses in the Court House Square. The County Crown Attorney
was unusually, oddly, reinforced by Cruickshank, of Toronto--the great
Cruickshank, K.C., probably the most distinguished criminal lawyer in
the Province. There were those who considered that Cruickshank should
not have been brought down, that it argued undue influence on the
part of the bank, and his retainer was a fierce fan to the feeling in
Moneida; but there is no doubt that his appearance added all that was
possible to the universal interest in the case. Henry Cruickshank was an
able man and, what was rarer a fastidious politician. He had held office
in the Dominion Cabinet, and had resigned it because of a difference
with his colleagues in the application of a principle; they called him,
after a British politician of lofty but abortive views, the Canadian
Renfaire. He had that independence of personality, that intellectual
candour, and that touch of magnetism which combine to make a man
interesting in his public relations. Cruickshank’s name alone would have
filled the courthouse, and people would have gone away quoting him.

From the first word of the case for the prosecution there was that in
the leading counsel’s manner--a gravity, a kindness, an inclination to
neglect the commoner methods of scoring--that suggested, with the sudden
chill of unexpectedly bad news, a foregone conclusion. The reality of
his feeling reference to the painful position of the defendant’s father,
the sincerity of his regret on behalf of the bank, for the deplorable
exigency under which proceedings had been instituted, spread a kind of
blankness through the court; men frowned thoughtfully, and one or two
ladies shed furtive tears. Even the counsel for the defence, it was
afterward remembered, looked grave, sympathetic, and concerned, in
response to the brief but significant and moving sentences with which
his eminent opponent opened the case. It is not my duty to report the
trial for any newspaper; I will therefore spare myself more than the
most general references; but the facts undoubtedly were that a safe in
the strong room of the bank had been opened between certain hours on a
certain night and its contents abstracted; that young Ormiston, cashier
of the bank, was sleeping, or supposed to be sleeping, upon the premises
at this time, during the illness of the junior whose usual duty it was;
and that the Crown was in possession of certain evidence which would be
brought forward to prove collusion with the burglary on the part of
the defendant, collusion to cover deficits for which he could be held
responsible. In a strain almost apologetic, Mr Cruickshank explained
to the jury the circumstances which led the directors to the suspicion
which they now believed only too regrettably well founded. These
consisted in the fact that the young man was known to be living beyond
his means, and so to be constantly visited by the temptation to such
a crime; the special facilities which he controlled for its commission
and, in particular, the ease and confidence with which the actual
operation had been carried out, arguing no fear of detection on the
part of the burglars, no danger of interference from one who should have
stood ready to defend with his life the property in his charge, but who
would shortly be seen to have been toward it, first, a plunderer in his
own person, and afterward the accomplice of plunderers to conceal
his guilt. Examination showed the safe to have been opened with the
dexterity that demands both time and coolness; and the ash from a pipe
knocked out against the wall at the side of the passage offered ironical
testimony to the comfort in which the business had been done.

The lawyer gave these considerations their full weight, and it was
in dramatic contrast with the last of them that he produced the first
significant fragment of evidence against Ormiston. There had been, after
all, some hurry of departure. It was shown by a sheet of paper bearing
the mark of a dirty thumb and a hasty boot-heel, bearing also the
combination formula for opening the safe.

The public was familiar with that piece of evidence; it had gone
through every kind of mill of opinion; it made no special sensation. The
evidence of the caretaker who found the formula and of the witnesses who
established it to be in young Ormiston’s handwriting, produced little
interest. Mr Cruickshank, in elaborating his theory as to why with the
formula in their hands the depredators still found it necessary to pick
the lock, offered nothing to speculations already current--the duplicate
key with which they had doubtless been enabled to supply themselves
was a clumsy copy and had failed them; that conclusion had been drawn
commonly enough. The next scrap of paper produced by the prosecution was
another matter. It was the mere torn end of a greasy sheet; upon it was
written “Not less than 3,000 net,” and it had been found in the turning
out of Ormiston’s dressing-table. It might have been anything--a number
of people pursed their lips contemptuously--or it might have been,
without doubt, the fragment of a disreputable transaction that the
prosecuting counsel endeavoured to show it. Here, no doubt, was one of
the pieces of evidence the prosecution was understood to have up its
sleeve, and that portion of the prosecuting counsel’s garment was
watched with feverish interest for further disclosures. They came
rapidly enough, but we must hurry them even more. The name of Miss
Florence Belton, when it rose to the surface of the evidence, riveted
every eye and ear. Miss Belton was one of those ambiguous ladies who
sometimes drift out from the metropolitan vortex and circle restfully in
backwaters for varying periods, appearing and disappearing irrelevantly.
They dress beautifully; they are known to “paint” and thought to dye
their hair. They establish no relations, being much too preoccupied.
making exceptions only, as a rule, in favour of one or two young men, to
whom they extend amenities based--it is the common talk--upon late
hours and whiskey-and-soda. They seem superior to the little prevailing
conventions; they excite an unlawful interest; though nobody knows them
black nobody imagines them white; and when they appear upon Main Street
in search of shoelaces or elastic heads are turned and nods, possibly
nudges, exchanged. Miss Belton had come from New York to the Barker
House, Elgin, and young Ormiston’s intimacy with her was one of the
things that counted against him in the general view. It was to so count
more seriously in the particular instance. Witnesses were called to
prove that he had spent the evening of the burglary with Miss Belton at
her hotel, that he had remained with her until one o’clock, that he was
in the habit of spending his evenings with Miss Belton.

Rawlins of the Express did not overdo the sensation which was caused in
the courtroom when the name of this lady herself was called to summon
her to the witness box. It was indeed the despair of his whole career.
He thought despondingly ever after of the thrill, to which he himself
was not superior and which, if he had only been able to handle it
adequately, might have led him straight up the ladder to a night
editorship. Miss Belton appeared from some unsuspected seat near the
door, throwing back a heavy veil, and walking as austerely as she could,
considering the colour of her hair. She took her place without emotion
and there she corroborated the evidence of the servants of the hotel.
To the grave questions of the prosecution she fluently replied that the
distraction of these evenings had been cards--cards played, certainly,
for money, and that she, certainly, had won very considerable sums from
the defendant from time to time. In Elgin the very mention of cards
played for money will cause a hush of something deeper than disapproval;
there was silence in the court at this. In producing several banknotes
for Miss Belton’s identification, Mr Cruickshank seemed to profit by the
silence. Miss Belton identified them without hesitation, as she might
easily, since they had been traced to her possession. Asked to account
for them; she stated, without winking, that they had been paid to her by
Mr Walter Ormiston at various times during the fortnight preceding the
burglary, in satisfaction of debts at cards. She, Miss Belton, had left
Elgin for Chicago the day after the burglary. Mr Ormiston knew that she
was going. He had paid her the four fifty-dollar notes actually traced,
the night before she left, and said. “You won’t need to break these
here, will you?” He seemed anxious that she should not, but it was
the merest accident that she hadn’t. In all, she had received from Mr
Ormiston four hundred and fifty dollars. No, she had no suspicion that
the young man might not be in a position to make such payments. She
understood that Mr Ormiston’s family was wealthy, and never thought
twice about it.

She spoke with a hard dignity, the lady, and a great effect of doing
business, a kind of assertion of the legitimate. The farmers of Fox
County told each other in chapfallen appreciation that she was about as
level-headed as they make them. Lawyer Cruickshank, as they called him,
brought forth from her detail after detail, and every detail fitted
damningly with the last. The effect upon young Ormiston was so painful
that many looked another way. His jaw was set and his features
contorted to hold himself from the disgrace of tears. He was generally
acknowledged to be overwhelmed by the unexpected demonstration of his
guilt, but distress was so plain in him that there was not a soul in
the place that was not sorry for him. In one or two resolute faces hope
still glimmered, but it hardly survived the cross-examination of the
Crown’s chief witness by the counsel for the defence which, as far as
it went, had a perfunctory air and contributed little to the evidence
before the Court. It did not go all the way, however. The case having
opened late, the defence was reserved till the following day, when
proceedings would be resumed with the further cross-examination of Miss
Belton.

As the defendant’s counsel went down the courthouse steps Rawlins came
up to him to take note of his demeanour and anything else that might be
going.

“Pretty stiff row to hoe you’ve got there, Lorne,” he said.

“Pretty stiff,” responded Lorne.



CHAPTER XI

Imagination, one gathers, is a quality dispensed with of necessity in
the practice of most professions, being that of which nature is, for
some reason, most niggardly. There is no such thing as passing in
imagination for any department of public usefulness, even the government
of Oriental races; the list of the known qualified would be exhausted,
perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher
enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must;
it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have
hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was
indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client’s
situation, the view which came to him and stayed with him like a chapter
in a novel, from the hour in which Ormiston had reluctantly accounted
for himself upon the night of the burglary. It was a brilliant view,
that perceived the young clerk the victim of the conspiracy he was
charged with furthering; its justification lay back, dimly, among the
intuitions about human nature which are part of the attribute I
have quoted. I may shortly say that it was justified; another day’s
attendance at the Elgin Courthouse shall not be compulsory here,
whatever it may have been there. Young Ormiston’s commercial probity
is really no special concern of ours; the thing which does matter, and
considerably, is the special quality which Lorne Murchison brought to
the task of its vindication, the quality that made new and striking
appeal, through every channel of the great occasion, to those who heard
him. It was that which reinforced and comforted every friend Ormiston
had in the courtroom, before Lorne proceeded either to deal with the
evidence of the other side, or to produce any jot or tittle of his own;
and it was that which affected his distinguished opponent to the special
interest which afterward showed itself so pleasantly superior to the
sting of defeat. The fact that the defence was quite as extraordinarily
indebted to circumstantial evidence as the prosecution in no way
detracted from the character of Lorne’s personal triumph; rather,
indeed, in the popular view and Rawlins’s, enhanced it. There was in
it the primitive joy of seeing a ruffian knocked down with his own
illegitimate weapons, from the moment the dropped formula was proved to
be an old superseded one, and unexpected indication was produced that
Ormiston’s room, as well as the bank vault, had been entered the night
of the robbery, to the more glorious excitement of establishing Miss
Belton’s connection--not to be quoted--with a cracksman at that moment
being diligently inquired for by the New York police with reference to
a dramatically bigger matter. You saw the plot at once as he constructed
it; the pipe ash became explicable in the seduction of Miss Belton’s
charms. The cunning net unwove itself, delicately and deliberately, to
tangle round the lady. There was in it that superiority in the art of
legerdemain, of mere calm, astonishing manipulation, so applauded in
regions where romance has not yet been quite trampled down by reason.
Lorne scored; he scored in face of probability, expectation, fact; it
was the very climax and coruscation of score. He scored not only by the
cards he held but by the beautiful way he played them, if one may say
so. His nature came into this, his gravity and gentleness, his sympathy,
his young angry irony. To mention just one thing, there was the way he
held Miss Belton up, after the exposure of her arts, as the lady for
whom his client had so chivalric a regard that he had for some time
refused to state his whereabouts at the hour the bank was entered in
the fear of compromising her. For this, no doubt, his client could have
strangled him, but it operated, of course, to raise the poor fellow
in the estimation of every body, with the possible exception of his
employers. When, after the unmistakable summing-up, the foreman returned
in a quarter of an hour with the verdict of “Not guilty,” people
noticed that the young man walked out of court behind his father with
as drooping a head as if he had gone under sentence; so much so that
by common consent he was allowed to slip quietly away. Miss Belton
departed, followed by the detective, whose services were promptly
transferred to the prosecution, and by a proportion of those who scented
further entertainment in her perfumed, perjured wake. But the majority
hung back, leaving their places slowly; it was Lorne the crowd wanted
to shake hands with to say just a word of congratulation to, Lorne’s
triumph that they desired to enhance by a hearty sentence, or at least
an admiring glance. Walter Winter was among the most genial.

“Young man,” he said, “what did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you you ought
to take this case?” Mr Winter, with his chest thrust out, plumed and
strutted in justifiable pride of prophecy. “Now, I’ll tell you another
thing: today’s event will do more for you than it has for Ormiston. Mark
my words!”

They were all of that opinion, all the fine foretellers of the profit
Lorne should draw from his spirited and conspicuous success; they
stood about in knots discussing it; to some extent it eclipsed the main
interest and issue of the day, at that moment driving out, free and
disconsolate, between the snake fences of the South Riding to Moneida
Reservation. The quick and friendly sense of opportunity was abroad on
Lorne Murchison’s behalf; friends and neighbours and Dr Drummond, and
people who hardly knew the fellow, exchanged wise words about what his
chance would do for him. What it would immediately do was present to
nobody so clearly, however, as to Mr Henry Cruickshank, who decided that
he would, after all, accept Dr Drummond’s invitation to spend the night
with him, and find out the little he didn’t know already about this
young man.

That evening the Murchisons’ doorbell rang twice. The first time it was
to admit the Rev. Hugh Finlay, who had come to return Sordello, which he
had borrowed from Advena, and to find out whether she thought with him
about the interpretation of certain passages, and if not--there was
always the possibility--wherein their divergence lay. The second time
the door opened to Dr Drummond and Mr Cruickshank; and the electric
light had to be turned on in the drawing-room, since the library was
already occupied by Mr Finlay and Advena, Mr and Mrs Murchison never
having got over their early habit of sitting in the dining-room after
tea. Even then Mrs Murchison had to put away her workbasket, and John
Murchison to knock the ashes out of his pipe, looking at one another
with surprised inquiry when Eliza informed them of their visitors.
Luckily, Mr Lorne was also in, and Eliza was sent to tell him, and
Mr Lorne came down the stairs two at a time to join the party in the
drawing-room, which was presently supplied by Eliza with a dignified
service of cake and wine. The hall divided that room from the library,
and both doors were shut. We cannot hesitate about which to open; we
have only, indeed, to follow the recognized tradition of Elgin, which
would never have entered the library. No vivid conclusion should be
drawn, no serious situation may even be indicated. It would simply have
been considered, in Elgin, stupid to go into the library.

“It isn’t a case for the High Commissioner for Canada,” Mr Cruickshank
was saying. “It’s a case for direct representation of the interests
concerned, and their view of the effect upon trade. That’s the only
voice to speak with if you want to get anything done. Conviction carries
conviction. The High Commissioner is a very useful fellow to live
in London and look after the ornamental, the sentimental, and
immigration--nobody could do it better than Selkirk. And in England, of
course, they like that kind of agency. It’s the good old dignified
way; but it won’t do for everything. You don’t find our friend Morgan
operating through the American equivalent of a High Commissioner.”

“No, you don’t,” said John Murchison.

“He goes over there as a principal, and the British Government, if he
wants to deal with it, is only another principal. That’s the way our
deputation will go. We’re practically all shippers, though of course the
matter of tenders will come later. There is big business for them here,
national business, and we propose to show it. The subsidy we want will
come back to the country four times over in two years. Freights from
Boston alone--”

“It’s the patriotic, imperial argument you’ll have to press, I doubt,”
 said John Murchison. “They’re not business people over there--the men in
office are not. How should they be? The system draws them from the
wrong class. They’re gentlemen--noblemen, maybe--first, and they’ve no
practical education. There’s only one way of getting it, and that’s to
make your own living. How many of them have ever made tuppence? There’s
where the Americans beat them so badly--they’ve got the sixth sense,
the business sense. No; you’ll not find them responding greatly to what
there is in it for trade--they’d like to well enough, but they just
won’t see it; and, by George! what a fine suspicion they’ll have of ye!
As to freights from Boston,” he continued, as they all laughed, “I’m
of opinion you’d better not mention them. What! steal the trade of a
friendly power! Tut, tut!”

It was a long speech for John Murchison, but they were all excited to a
pitch beyond the usual. Henry Cruickshank had brought with him an
event of extraordinary importance. It seemed to sit there with him,
significant and propitious, in the middle of the sofa; they all looked
at it in the pauses. Dr Drummond, lost in an armchair, alternately
contemplated it and remembered to assert himself part of it. As head of
a deputation from the United Chambers of Commerce of Canada shortly
to wait on the British Government to press for the encouragement of
improved communications within the Empire, Cruickshank had been asked
to select a secretary. The appointment, in view of the desirability,
for political reasons, of giving the widest publicity to the hopes
and motives of the deputation, was an important one. The action of the
Canadian Government, in extending conditional promises of support, had
to be justified to the Canadian taxpayer; and that shy and weary person
whose shoulders uphold the greatness of Britain, had also to receive
such conciliation and reassurance as it was possible to administer to
him, by way of nerving the administrative arm over there to an act of
enterprise. Mr Cruickshank had had two or three young fellows, mostly
newspaper men, in his mind’s eye; but when Lorne came into his literal
range of vision, the others had promptly been retired in our friend’s
favour. Young Mr Murchison, he had concluded, was the man they wanted;
and if his office could spare him, it would probably do young Mr
Murchison no harm in any sort of way to accompany the deputation to
London and throw himself into the matter the deputation had at heart.

“But it’s the Empire!” said Lorne, with a sort of shy fire, when Mr
Cruickshank enunciated this.

We need not, perhaps, dwell upon the significance of his agreement. It
was then not long since the maple leaf had been stained brighter than
ever, not without honour, to maintain the word that fell from him. The
three older men looked at him kindly; John Murchison, rubbing his chin
as he considered the situation, slightly shook his head. One took it
that in his view the Empire was not so readily envisaged.

“That has a strong bearing,” Mr Cruickshank assented.

“It’s the whole case--it seems to me,” repeated young Murchison.

“It should help to knit us up,” said Dr Drummond. “I’ll put my name down
on the first passenger list, if Knox Church will let me off. See that
you have special rates,” he added, with a twinkle, “for ministers and
missionaries.”

“And only ten days to get him ready in,” said Mrs Murchison. “It will
take some seeing to, I assure you; and I don’t know how it’s to be done
in the time. For once, Lorne, I’ll have to order you ready-made shirts,
and you’ll just have to put up with it. Nothing else could possibly get
back from the wash.”

“I’ll put up with it, Mother.”

They went into other details of Lorne’s equipment while Mrs Murchison’s
eye still wandered over the necessities of his wardrobe. They arranged
the date on which he was to meet the members of the deputation in
Montreal, and Mr Cruickshank promised to send him all available
documents and such presentation of the project as had been made in the
newspapers.

“You shall be put in immediate possession of the bones of the thing,”
 he said, “but what really matters,” he added pleasantly, “I think you’ve
got already.”

It took, of course, some discussion, and it was quite ten o’clock before
everything was gone into, and the prospect was clear to them all. As
they emerged into the hall together, the door of the room opposite also
opened, and the Rev. Hugh Finlay found himself added to their group.
They all made the best of the unexpected encounter. It was rather an
elaborate best, very polite and entirely grave, except in the instance
of Dr Drummond, who met his subaltern with a smile in which cordiality
struggled in vain to overcome the delighted humour.



CHAPTER XII

It was the talk of the town, the pride of the market-place, Lorne
Murchison’s having been selected to accompany what was known as the
Cruickshank deputation to England. The general spirit of congratulation
was corrected by a tendency to assert it another proof of sagacity on
the chairman’s part; Elgin wouldn’t be too flattered; Lawyer Cruickshank
couldn’t have done better. You may be sure the Express was well
ahead with it. “Honour to Our Young Fellow Townsman. A Well-Merited
Compliment,” and Rawlins was round promptly next morning to glean
further particulars. He found only Mrs Murchison, on a stepladder tying
up the clematis that climbed about the verandah, and she told him a
little about clematis and a good deal about the inconvenience of having
to abandon superintending the spring cleaning in order to get Lorne
ready to go to the Old Country at such short notice, but nothing he
could put in the paper. Lorne, sought at the office, was hardly more
communicative. Mr Williams himself dropped in there. He said the Express
would now have a personal interest in the object of the deputation, and
proposed to strike out a broad line, a broader line than ever.

“We’ve got into the way of taking it for granted,” said Mr Williams,
“that the subsidy idea is a kind of mediaeval idea. Raise a big enough
shout and you get things taken for granted in economics for a long
while. Conditions keep changing, right along, all the time, and
presently you’ve got to reconsider. There ain’t any sort of ultimate
truth in the finest economic position, my son; not any at all.”

“We’ll subsidize over here, right enough,” said Lorne.

“That’s the idea--that’s the prevailing idea, just now. But lots of
people think different--more than you’d imagine. I was talking to
old man Milburn just now--he’s dead against it. ‘Government has no
business,’ he said, ‘to apply the taxes in the interests of any company.
It oughtn’t to know how to spell “subsidy.” If the trade was there it
would get itself carried,’ he said.”

“Well, that surprises me,” said Lorne.

“Surprised me, too. But I was on the spot with him; just thought of it
in time. ‘Well, now, Mr Milburn,’ I said, ‘you’ve changed your mind.
Thought that was a thing you Conservatives never did,’ I said. ‘We
don’t--I haven’t,’ he said. ‘What d’ye mean? Twenty-five years ago,’ I
said, ‘when you were considering whether you’d start the Milburn Boiler
Works here or in Hamilton, Hamilton offered you a free site, and Elgin
offered you a free site and a dam for your water power. You took the
biggest subsidy an’ came here,’ I said.”

Lorne laughed: “What did he say to that?”

“Hadn’t a word. ‘I guess it’s up to me,’ he said. Then he turned round
and came back. ‘Hold on, Williams; he said. ‘You know so much already
about my boiler works, it wouldn’t be much trouble for you to write out
an account of them from the beginning, would it? Working in the last
quarter of a century of the town’s progress, you know, and all that.
Come round to the office tomorrow, and I’ll give you some pointers.’ And
he fixed up a two-column ad right away. He was afraid I’d round on him,
I suppose, if I caught him saying anything more about the immorality of
subsidies.”

“He won’t say anything more.”

“Probably not. Milburn hasn’t got much of a political conscience, but
he’s got a sense of what’s silly. Well, now, I expect you want all the
time there is.”

Mr Williams removed himself from the edge of the table, which was strewn
with maps and bluebooks, printed official, and typewritten demi-official
papers.

“Give ‘em a notion of those Assiniboian wheat acres, my boy, and the
ranch country we’ve got; tell ‘em about the future of quick passage and
cold storage. Get ‘em a little ashamed to have made so many fortunes for
Yankee beef combines; persuade ‘em the cheapest market has a funny way
of getting the dearest price in the end. Give it ‘em, Lorne, hot and
cold and fricasseed. The Express will back you up.”

He slapped his young friend’s shoulder, who seemed occupied with
matters that prevented his at once feeling the value of this assurance.
“Bye-bye,” said Mr Williams. “See you again before you start.”

“Oh, of course!” Lorne replied. “I’ll--I’ll come round. By the
way, Williams, Mr Milburn didn’t say anything--anything about me in
connection with this business? Didn’t mention, I suppose, what he
thought about my going?”

“Not a word, my boy! He was away up in abstract principles; he generally
is. Bye-bye.”

“It’s gone to his head a little bit--only natural,” Horace reflected as
he went down the stairs. “He’s probably just feeding on what folks think
of it. As if it mattered a pin’s head what Octavius Milburn thinks or
don’t think!”

Lorne, however, left alone with his customs returns and his immigration
reports, sat still, attaching a weight quite out of comparison with a
pin’s head to Mr Milburn’s opinion. He turned it over and over, instead
of the tabulated figures that were his business: he had to show himself
his way to the conclusion that such a thing could not matter seriously
in the end, since Milburn hadn’t a dollar involved--it would be
different if he were a shareholder in the Maple Line. He wished
heartily, nevertheless, that he could demonstrate a special advantage
to boiler-makers in competitive freights with New York. What did they
import, confound them! Pig-iron? Plates and rivets? Fortunately he was
in a position to get at the facts, and he got at them with an interest
of even greater intensity than he had shown to the whole question since
ten that morning. Even now, the unprejudiced observer, turning up the
literature connected with the Cruickshank deputation, may notice a
stress laid upon the advantages to Canadian importers of ore in certain
stages of manufacture which may strike him as slightly, very slightly,
special. Of course there are a good many of them in the country. So
that Mr Horace Williams was justified to some extent in his kindly
observation upon the excusable egotism of youth. Two or three letters,
however, came in while Lorne was considering the relation of plates and
rivets to the objects of his deputation. They were all congratulatory;
one was from the chairman of the Liberal Association at its headquarters
in Toronto. Lorne glanced at them and stowed them away in his pocket.
He would read them when he got home, when it would be a pleasure to hand
them over to his mother. She was making a collection of them.

He had a happy perception that same evening that Mr Milburn’s position
was not, after all, finally and invincibly taken against the deputation
and everything--everybody--concerned with it. He met that gentleman at
his own garden gate. Octavius paused in his exit, to hold it open for
young Murchison, thus even assisting the act of entry, a thing which
thrilled Lorne sweetly enough when he had time to ponder its possible
significance. Alas! the significance that lovers find! Lorne read a
world in the behaviour of Dora’s father in holding the gate open. He
saw political principle put aside in his favour, and social position
forgotten in kindness to him. He saw the gravest, sincerest appreciation
of his recent success, which he took as humbly as a dog will take a
bone; he read a fatherly thought at which his pulses bounded in an
arrogance of triumph, and his heart rose to ask its trust. And Octavius
Milburn had held the gate open because it was more convenient to hold
it open than to leave it open. He had not a political view in the world
that was calculated to affect his attitude toward a practical matter;
and his opinion of Lorne was quite uncomplicated: he thought him a very
likely young fellow. Milburn himself, in the Elgin way, preferred to
see no great significance of this sort anywhere. Young people were
young people; it was natural enough that they should like each other’s
society. They, the Milburns, were very glad to see Mr Murchison, very
glad indeed. It was frequent matter for veiled humorous reference at
the table that he had been to call again, at which Dora would look very
stiff and dignified, and have to be coaxed back into the conversation.
As to anything serious, there was no hurry; plenty of time to think of
that. Such matters dwelt under the horizon; there was no need to scan
them closely; and Mr Milburn went his way, conscious of nothing more
than a comfortable gratification that Dora, so far as the young men were
concerned, seemed as popular as other girls.

Dora was not in the drawing-room. Young ladies in Elgin had always to
be summoned from somewhere. For all the Filkin instinct for the
conservation of polite tradition, Dora was probably reading the
Toronto society weekly--illustrated, with correspondents all over the
Province--on the back verandah and, but for the irruption of a visitor,
would probably not have entered the formal apartment of the house at
all that evening. Drawing-rooms in Elgin had their prescribed uses--to
receive in, to practise in, and for the last sad entertainment of the
dead, when the furniture was disarranged to accommodate the trestles;
but the common business of life went on outside them, even among
prosperous people, the survival, perhaps, of a habit based upon thrift.
The shutters were opened when Lorne entered, to let in the spring
twilight, and the servant pulled a chair into its proper relation with
the room as she went out.

Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin both came in before Dora did. Lorne found
their conversation enchanting, though it was mostly about the difficulty
of keeping the lawn tidy; they had had so much rain. Mrs Milburn assured
him kindly that there was not such another lawn as his father’s in
Elgin. How Mr Murchison managed to have it looking so nice always she
could not think. Only yesterday she and Mr Milburn had stopped to admire
it as they passed.

“Spring is always a beautiful time in Elgin,” she remarked. “There are
so many pretty houses here, each standing in its own grounds. Nothing
very grand, as I tell my friend, Miss Cham, from Buffalo where the
residences are, of course, on quite a different scale; but grandeur
isn’t everything, is it?”

“No, indeed,” said Lorne.

“But you will be leaving for Great Britain very soon now, Mr Murchison,”
 said Miss Filkin. “Leaving Elgin and all its beauties! And I dare say
you won’t think of them once again till you get back!”

“I hope I shall not be so busy as that, Miss Filkin.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure Mr Murchison won’t forget his native town altogether,”
 said Mrs Milburn, “though perhaps he won’t like it so well after seeing
dear old England!”

“I expect,” said Lorne simply, “to like it better.”

“Well, of course, we shall all be pleased if you say that, Mr
Murchison,” Mrs Milburn replied graciously. “We shall feel quite
complimented. But I’m afraid you will find a great deal to criticize
when you come back--that is, if you go at all into society over there. I
always say there can be nothing like good English society.”

“I want to attend a sitting of the House,” Lorne said. “I hope I shall
have time for that. I want to see those fellows handling their public
business. I don’t believe I shall find our men so far behind, for point
of view and grasp and dispatch. Of course there’s always Wallingham to
make a standard for us all. But they haven’t got so many Wallinghams.”

“Wasn’t it Wallingham, Louisa, that Mr Milburn was saying at breakfast
was such a dangerous man? So able, he said, but dangerous. Something to
do with the tariff.”

“Oh?” said Lorne, and he said no more, for at that moment Dora came
in. She came in looking very straight and graceful and composed. Her
personal note was carried out in her pretty clothes, which hung and
“sat” upon her like the rhythm of verses; they could fall no other way.
She had in every movement the definite accent of young ladyhood; she was
very much aware of herself, of the situation, and of her value in it,
a setting for herself she saw it, and saw it truly. No one, from the
moment she entered the room, looked at anything else.

“Oh, Mr Murchison,” she said. “How do you do? Mother, do you mind if I
open the window? It’s quite warm out of doors--regular summer.”

Lorne sprang to open the window, while Miss Filkin, murmuring that it
had been a beautiful day, moved a little farther from it.

“Oh, please don’t trouble, Mr Murchison; thank you very much!” Miss
Milburn continued, and subsided on a sofa. “Have you been playing tennis
this week?”

Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only
once.

“The courts aren’t a bit in good order. They want about a week’s
rolling. The balls get up anywhere,” said Dora.

“Lawn tennis,” Mrs Milburn asserted herself, “is a delightful exercise.
I hope it will never go out of fashion; but that is what we used to say
of croquet, and it has gone out and come in again.”

Lorne listened to this with deference; there was a hint of patience in
the regard Dora turned upon her mother. Mrs Milburn continued to
dilate upon lawn tennis, dealt lightly with badminton, and brought the
conversation round with a graceful sweep to canoeing. Dora’s attitude
before she had done became slightly permissive, but Mrs Milburn held on
till she had accomplished her conception of conduct for the occasion;
then she remembered a meeting in the schoolhouse.

“We are to have an address by an Indian bishop,” she told them. “He is
on his way to England by China and Japan, and is staying with our dear
rector, Mr Murchison. Such a treat I expect it will be.”

“What I am dying to know,” said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, “is
whether he is black or white!”

Mrs Milburn then left the room, and shortly afterward Miss Filkin
thought she could not miss the bishop either, conveying the feeling
that a bishop was a bishop, of whatever colour. She stayed three minutes
longer than Mrs Milburn, but she went. The Filkin tradition, though
strong, could not hold out entirely against the unwritten laws, the
silently claimed privileges, of youth in Elgin. It made its pretence and
vanished.

Even as the door closed the two that were left looked at one another
with a new significance. A simpler relation established itself between
them and controlled all that surrounded them; the very twilight seemed
conscious with it; the chairs and tables stood in attentive harmony.

“You know,” said Dora, “I hate your going, Lorne!”

She did indeed seem moved, about the mouth, to discontent. There was
some little injury in the way she swung her foot.

“I was hoping Mr Fulke wouldn’t get better in time; I was truly!”

The gratitude in young Murchison’s eyes should have been dear to her. I
don’t know whether she saw it; but she must have been aware that she was
saying what touched him, making her point.

“Oh, it’s a good thing to go, Dora.”

“A good thing for you! And the regatta coming off the first week in
June, and a whole crowd coming from Toronto for it. There isn’t another
person in town I care to canoe with, Lorne, you know perfectly well!”

“I’m awfully sorry!” said Lorne. “I wish--”

“Oh, I’m GOING, I believe. Stephen Stuart has written from Toronto, and
asked me to sail with him. I haven’t told Mother, but he’s my second
cousin, so I suppose she won’t make a fuss.”

The young man’s face clouded; seeing which she relented. “Oh, of course,
I’m glad you’re going, really,” she assured him. “And we’ll all be proud
to be acquainted with such a distinguished gentleman when you get back.
Do you think you’ll see the King? You might, you know, in London.”

“I’ll see him if he’s visible,” laughed Lorne. “That would be something
to tell your mother, wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid we won’t be doing
business with His Majesty.”

“I expect you’ll have the loveliest time you ever had in all your life.
Do you think you’ll be asked out much, Lorne?”

“I can’t imagine who would ask me. We’ll get off easy if the street boys
don’t shout: ‘What price Canucks?’ at us! But I’ll see England, Dora;
I’ll feel England, eat and drink and sleep and live in England, for a
little while. Isn’t the very name great? I’ll be a better man for going,
till I die. We’re all right out here, but we’re young and thin and
weedy. They didn’t grow so fast in England, to begin with, and now
they’re rich with character and strong with conduct and hoary with
ideals. I’ve been reading up the history of our political relations with
England. It’s astonishing what we’ve stuck to her through, but you can’t
help seeing why--it’s for the moral advantage. Way down at the bottom,
that’s what it is. We have the sense to want all we can get of that
sort of thing. They’ve developed the finest human product there is,
the cleanest, the most disinterested, and we want to keep up the
relationship--it’s important. Their talk about the value of their
protection doesn’t take in the situation as it is now. Who would touch
us if we were running our own show?”

“I don’t believe they are a bit better than we are,” replied Miss
Milburn. “I’m sure I haven’t much opinion of the Englishmen that come
out here. They don’t think anything of getting into debt, and as often
as not they drink, and they never know enough to--to come in out of the
rain. But, Lorne--”

“Yes, but we’re very apt to get the failures. The fellows their folks
give five or six hundred pounds to and tell them they’re not expected
back till they’re making a living. The best men find their level
somewhere else, along recognized channels. Lord knows we don’t want
them--this country’s for immigrants. We’re manufacturing our own
gentlemen quite fast enough for the demand.”

“I should think we were! Why, Lorne, Canadians--nice Canadians are just
as gentlemanly as they can be! They’ll compare with anybody. Perhaps
Americans have got more style:” she weighed the matter; “but Canadians
are much better form, I think. But, Lorne, how perfectly dear of you to
send me those roses. I wore them, and nobody there had such beauties.
All the girls wanted to know where I got them, but I only told Lily,
just to make her feel a pig for not having asked you--my very greatest
friend! She just about apologized--told me she wanted to ask about
twenty more people, but her mother wouldn’t let her. They’ve lost an
uncle or something lately, and if it hadn’t been for Clara Sims staying
with them they wouldn’t have been giving anything.”

“I’ll try to survive not having been asked. But I’m glad you wore the
roses, Dora.”

“I dropped one, and Phil Carter wanted to keep it. He’s so silly!”

“Did you--did you let him keep it?”

“Lorne Murchison! Do you think I’d let any man keep a rose I’d been
wearing?”

He looked at her, suddenly emboldened. “I don’t know about roses, Dora,
but pansies--those are awfully nice ones in your dress. I’m very fond
of pansies; couldn’t you spare me one? I wouldn’t ask for a rose, but a
pansy--”

His eyes were more ardent than what he found to say. Beneath them Dora
grew delicately pink. The pansies drooped a little; she put her slender
fingers under one, and lifted its petals.

“It’s too faded for your buttonhole,” she said.

“It needn’t stay in my buttonhole. I know lots of other places!” he
begged.

Dora considered the pansy again, then she pulled it slowly out, and the
young man got up and went over to her, proffering the lapel of his coat.

“It spoils the bunch,” she said prettily. “If I give you this you will
have to give me something to take its place.”

“I will,” said Lorne.

“I know it will be something better,” said Dora, and there was a little
effort in her composure. “You send people such beautiful flowers,
Lorne.”

She rose beside him as she spoke, graceful and fair, to fasten it in;
and it was his hand that shook.

“Then may I choose it?” said Lorne. “And will you wear it?”

“I suppose you may. Why are you--why do you--Oh, Lorne, stand still!”

“I’ll give you, you sweet girl, my whole heart!” he said in the vague
tender knowledge that he offered her a garden, where she had but to
walk, and smile, to bring about her unimaginable blooms.



CHAPTER XIII

They sat talking on the verandah in the close of the May evening, Mr and
Mrs Murchison. The Plummer Place was the Murchison Place in the town’s
mouth now, and that was only fair; the Murchisons had overstamped the
Plummers. It lay about them like a map of their lives: the big horse
chestnut stood again in flower to lighten the spring dusk for them,
as it had done faithfully for thirty years. John was no longer in his
shirt-sleeves; the growing authority of his family had long prescribed
a black alpaca coat. He smoked his meerschaum with the same old
deliberation, however, holding it by the bowl as considerately as he
held its original, which lasted him fifteen years. A great deal of
John Murchison’s character was there, in the way he held his pipe, his
gentleness and patience, even the justice and repose and quiet strength
of his nature. He smoked and read the paper the unfailing double solace
of his evenings. I should have said that it was Mrs Murchison who
talked. She had the advantage of a free mind, only subconsciously
occupied with her white wool and agile needles; and John had frequently
to choose between her observations and the politics of the day.

“You saw Lorne’s letter this morning, Father?”

John took his pipe out of his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

“He seems tremendously taken up with Wallingham. It was all Wallingham,
from one end to the other.”

“It’s not remarkable,” said John Murchison, patiently.

“You’d think he had nothing else to write about. There was that
reception at Lord What-you-may-call-him’s, the Canadian Commissioner’s,
when the Prince and Princess of Wales came, and brought their family.
I’d like to have heard something more about that than just that he was
there. He might have noticed what the children had on. Now that Abby’s
family is coming about her I seem to have my hands as full of children’s
clothes as ever I had. Abby seems to think there’s nothing like my old
patterns; I’m sure I’m sick of the sight of them!”

Mr Murchison refolded his newspaper, took his pipe once more from his
mouth, and said nothing.

“John, put down that paper! I declare it’s enough to drive anybody
crazy! Now look at that boy walking across the lawn. He does it every
night, delivering the Express, and you take no more notice! He’s wearing
a regular path!”

“Sonny,” said Mr Murchison, as the urchin approached, “you mustn’t walk
across the grass.”

“Much good that will do!” remarked Mrs Murchison. “I’d teach him to
walk across the grass, if--if it were my business. Boy--isn’t your name
Willie Parker? Then it was your mother I promised the coat and the other
things to, and you’ll find them ready there, just inside the hall door.
They’ll make down very well for you, but you can tell her from me that
she’d better double-seam them, for the stuff’s apt to ravel. And attend
to what Mr Murchison says; go out by the gravel--what do you suppose
it’s there for?”

Mrs Murchison readjusted her glasses, and turned another row of the tiny
sock. “I must say it’s a pleasure to have the lawn neat and green,”
 she said, with a sigh. “Never did I expect to see the day it would be
anything but chickweed and dandelions. We’ve a great deal to be thankful
for, and all our children spared to us, too. John,” she continued,
casting a shrewd glance over her needles at nothing in particular; “do
you suppose anything was settled between Lorne and Dora Milburn before
he Started?”

“He said nothing to me about it.”

“Oh, well, very likely he wouldn’t. Young people keep such a tremendous
lot to themselves nowadays. But it’s my belief they’ve come to an
understanding.”

“Lily might do worse,” said John Murchison, judicially.

“I should think Dora might do worse! I don’t know where she’s going to
do better! The most promising young man in Elgin, well brought up, well
educated, well started in a profession! There’s not a young fellow in
this town to compare with Lorne, and perfectly well you know it, John.
Might do worse! But that’s you all over. Belittle your own belongings!”

Mr Murchison smiled in amused tolerance. “They’ve always got you to blow
their trumpet, Mother,” he replied.

“And more than me. You ought to hear Dr Drummond about Lorne! He says
that if the English Government starts that line of boats to Halifax the
country will owe it to him, much more than to Cruickshank, or anybody
else.”

“Dr Drummond likes to talk,” said John Murchison.

“Lorne’s keeping his end up all right,” remarked Stella, jumping off
her bicycle in time to hear what her mother said. “It’s great, that old
Wallingham asking him to dinner. And haven’t I just been spreading it!”

“Where have you been, Stella?” asked Mrs Murchison.

“Oh, only over to the Milburns’. Dora asked me to come and show her
the new flower-stitch for table centres. Dora’s suddenly taken to fancy
work. She’s started a lot--a lot too much!” Stella added gloomily.

“If Dora likes to do fancy work I don’t see why anybody should want to
stop her,” remarked Mrs Murchison, with a meaning glance at her husband.

“I suppose she thinks she’s going to get Lorne,” said Stella. Her
resentment was only half-serious, but the note was there.

“What put that into your head?” asked her mother.

“Oh, well, anybody can see that he’s devoted to her, and has been
for ages, and it isn’t as if Lorne was one to HAVE girlfriends; she’s
absolutely the only thing he’s ever looked at twice. She hasn’t got a
ring, that’s true, but it would be just like her to want him to get it
in England. And I know they correspond. She doesn’t make any secret of
it.”

“Oh, I dare say! Other people have eyes in their head as well as you,
Stella,” said Mrs Murchison, stooping for her ball. “But there’s no need
to take things for granted at such a rate. And, above all, you’re not to
go TALKING, remember!”

“Well, if you think Dora Milburn’s good enough,” returned Lorne’s
youngest sister in threatening accents, “it’s more than I do, that’s
all. Hello, Miss Murchison!” she continued, as Advena appeared. “You’re
looking ‘xtremely dinky-dink. Expecting his reverence?”

Advena made no further reply than a look of scornful amusement, which
Stella, bicycling forth again, received in the back of her head.

“Father,” said Mrs Murchison, “if you had taken any share in the
bringing up of this family, Stella ought to have her ears boxed this
minute!”

“We’ll have to box them,” said Mr Murchison, “when she comes back.”
 Advena had retreated into the house. “IS she expecting his reverence?”
 asked her father with a twinkle.

“Don’t ask me! I’m sure it’s more than I can tell you. It’s a mystery
to me, that matter, altogether. I’ve known him come three evenings in a
week and not again for a month of Sundays. And when he does come there
they sit, talking about their books and their authors; you’d think the
world had nothing else in it! I know, for I’ve heard them, hard at it,
there in the library. Books and authors won’t keep their house or look
after their family for them; I can tell them that, if it does come to
anything, which I hope it won’t.”

“Finlay’s fine in the pulpit,” said John Murchison cautiously.

“Oh, the man’s well enough; it’s him I’m sorry for. I don’t call Advena
fitted to be a wife, and last of all a minister’s. Abby was a treasure
for any man to get, and Stella won’t turn out at all badly; she’s taking
hold very well for her age. But Advena simply hasn’t got it in her, and
that’s all there is to say about it.” Mrs Murchison pulled her needles
out right side out with finality. “I don’t deny the girl’s talented in
her own way, but it’s no way to marry on. She’d much better make up her
mind just to be a happy independent old maid; any woman might do worse.
And take no responsibilities.”

“There would always be you, Mother, for them to fall back on.” It was as
near as John Murchison ever got to flattery.

“No thank you, then! I’ve brought up six of my own, as well as I was
able, which isn’t saying much, and a hard life I’ve had of it. Now I’m
done with it; they’ll have to find somebody else to fall back on. If
they get themselves into such a mess”--Mrs Murchison stopped to laugh
with sincere enjoyment--“they needn’t look to me to get them out.”

“I guess you’d have a hand, Mother.”

“Not I. But the man isn’t thinking of any such folly. What do you
suppose his salary is?”

“Eight hundred and fifty dollars a year. They raised it last month.”

“And how far would Advena be able to make that go, with servants getting
the money they do and expecting the washing put out as a matter of
course? Do you remember Eliza, John, that we had when we were first
married? Seven dollars a month she got; she would split wood at a pinch,
and I’ve never had one since that could do up shirts like her. Three
years and a half she was with me, and did everything, everything I
didn’t do. But that was management, and Advena’s no manager. It would
be me that would tell him, if I had the chance. Then he couldn’t say he
hadn’t been warned. But I don’t think he has any such idea.”

“Advena,” pronounced Mr Murchison, “might do worse.”

“Well, I don’t know whether she might. The creature is well enough to
preach before a congregation. But what she can see in him out of the
pulpit is more than I know. A great gawk of a fellow, with eyes that
always look as if he were in the middle of next week! He may be able
to talk to Advena, but he’s no hand at general conversation; I know
he finds precious little to say to me. But he’s got no such notion. He
comes here because, being human, he’s got to open his mouth some time or
other, I suppose; but it’s my opinion he has neither Advena nor anybody
else in his mind’s eye at present. He doesn’t go the right way about
it.”

“H’m!” said John Murchison.

“He brought her a book the last time he came--what do you think the name
of it was? The something or other of Plato! Do you call that a natural
gift from a young man who is thinking seriously of a girl? Besides, if
I know anything about Plato he was a Greek heathen, and no writer for
a Presbyterian minister to go lending around. I’d Plato him to the
rightabout if it was me!”

“She might read worse than Plato,” remarked John.

“Oh, well, she read it fast enough. She’s your own daughter for
outlandish books. Mercy on us, here comes the man! We’ll just say ‘How
d’ye do?’ to him, and then start for Abby’s, John. I’m not easy in my
mind about the baby, and I haven’t been over since the morning. Harry
says it’s nothing but stomach, but I think I know whooping-cough when I
hear it. And if it is whooping-cough the boy will have to come here
and rampage, I suppose, till they’re clear of it. There’s some use in
grandmothers, if I do say it myself!”



CHAPTER XIV

If anyone had told Mr Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous
path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first
notable interest of his life in the calling and the country to which
even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any
woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far
enough back in accounting for this one would arrive at the female sort,
sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented
the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who
had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from
babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend--the mature
respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire
village whence he came. With such as these relations, actual or
imagined, could only be of the most practical kind, matters to be
arranged on grounds of expediency, and certainly not of the first
importance. The things of first importance--what you could do with your
energy and your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the
world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it of value to
yourself--left little room for the feminine consideration in Finlay’s
eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any
significance. Woman in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter
of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps
a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an
initiation to perceive her--a process to which Finlay would have been
as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute
of ideals about women--they would have formed in that case a strange
exception to his general outlook--but he saw them on a plane detached
and impersonal, concerned with the preservation of society the
maintenance of the home, the noble devotions of motherhood. Women had
been known, historically, to be capable of lofty sentiments and fine
actions: he would have been the last to withhold their due from women.
But they were removed from the scope of his imagination, partly by the
accidents I have mentioned and partly, no doubt, by a simple lack in him
of the inclination to seek and to know them.

So that Christie Cameron, when she came to stay with his aunt in Bross
during the few weeks after his ordination and before his departure for
Canada, found a fair light for judgement and more than a reasonable
disposition to acquiesce in the scale of her merits, as a woman, on the
part of Hugh Finlay. He was familiar with the scale of her merits before
she came; his Aunt Lizzie did little but run them up and down. When she
arrived she answered to every item she was a good height, but not too
tall; a nice figure of a woman, but not what you would call stout;
a fresh-faced body whose excellent principles were written in every
feature she had. She was five years older than Hugh, but even that he
came to accept in Aunt Lizzie’s skilful exhibition as something to the
total of her advantages. A pleasant independent creature with a hundred
a year of her own, sensible and vigorous and good-tempered, belonging as
well to the pre-eminently right denomination. She had virtues that might
have figured handsomely in an advertisement had Aunt Lizzie, in
the plenitude of her good will, thought fit to take that measure on
Christie’s behalf. But nothing was farther from Aunt Lizzie’s mind.
We must, in fairness, add Christie Cameron to the sum of Finlay’s
acquaintance with the sex; but even then the total is slender, little to
go upon.

Yet the fact which Mr Finlay would in those days have considered so
unimaginable remained; it had come into being and it remained. The chief
interest of his life, the chief human interest, did lie in his relations
with Advena Murchison. He might challenge it, but he could not move it;
he might explain, but he could not alter it. And there had come no point
at which it would have occurred to him to do either. When at last he
had seen how simple and possible it was to enjoy Miss Murchison’s
companionship upon unoccupied evenings he had begun to do it with
eagerness and zest, the greater because Elgin offered him practically no
other. Dr Drummond lived, for purposes of intellectual contact, at the
other end of the century, the other clergy and professional men of the
town were separated from Finlay by all the mental predispositions that
rose from the virgin soil. He was, as Mrs Murchison said, a great gawk
of a fellow; he had little adaptability; he was not of those who spend
a year or two in the New World and go back with a trans-Atlantic
accent, either of tongue or of mind. Where he saw a lack of dignity,
of consideration, or of restraint, he did not insensibly become less
dignified or considerate or restrained to smooth out perceptible
differences; nor was he constituted to absorb the qualities of those
defects, and enrich his nature by the geniality, the shrewdness, the
quick mental movement that stood on the other side of the account. He
cherished in secret an admiration for the young men of Elgin, with their
unappeasable energy and their indomitable optimism, but he could not
translate it in any language of sympathy and but for Advena his soul
would have gone uncomforted and alone.

Advena, as we know, was his companion. Seeing herself just that,
constantly content to be just that, she walked beside him closer than he
knew. She had her woman’s prescience and trusted it. Her own heart, all
sweetly alive, counselled her to patience; her instincts laid her in
bonds to concealment. She knew, she was sure; so sure that she could
play sometimes, smiling, with her living heart--

   The nightingale was not yet heard
   For the rose was not yet blown,

she could say of his; and what was that but play, and tender laughter,
at the expense of her own? And then, perhaps, looking up from the same
book, she would whisper, alone in her room--

   Oh, speed the day, thou dear, dear May,

and gaze humbly through tears at her own face in the glass loving it on
his behalf. She took her passion with the weight of a thing ordained;
she had come upon it where it waited for her, and they had gone on
together, carrying the secret. There might be farther to go, but the way
could never be long.

Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary;
and Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was
accomplished quickly, even summer.

“Except perhaps civilization.” she added. They were both young enough to
be pleased with cleverness for its specious self.

“Oh, that is slow everywhere,” he observed; “but how you can say so,
with every modern improvement staring you in the face--”

“Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t the products,”
 and she laughed. “But the thing itself, the precious thing; that never
comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art of
choice--”

“If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?” he
demanded. “Anaemia.”

“Oh, I don’t quarrel with the logic of it. I only point out the fact.
To do that is to acquiesce, really. I acquiesce; I have to. But one may
long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life
has gone on longer.”

“I imagine,” Finlay said, “that to wish truly and ardently for such
things is to possess them. If you didn’t possess them you wouldn’t
desire them! As they say, as they say--”

“As they say?”

“About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is
to be fatally infected.”

“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.

“Some novelist. I--I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat
confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon
the verandah. “I don’t write novels,” he said.

“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena. “I mean, of course,” she
added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”

“Heaven forbid!”

“Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it
comes into your scope. You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it;
you can’t feel it without living it. I don’t write novels either, but I
experience--whole publishers’ lists.”

“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date. You
see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern
moral sophistications--?”

“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied. “I often do.”

“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stories of pain”--he
looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms
were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her
adoration--“and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the
human heart. At least one likes to hope so.”

“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”

Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they
had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient
always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison
he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost irritably. “I only meant that I
see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle.
There’s reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more
delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think
that you don’t half realize, in a country like this, how much there is
to make up.”

“Is there anything really to make up?” she asked.

“Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the
absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as
education! Here you can’t even conceive it--the schools have been on
logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over
there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion;
here it doesn’t even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the
united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct
of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With
anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. ‘By all mean let the
ministers serve education on the School Boards,’ they would say, ‘by
election like other people’--an opportunity, by the way, which has just
been offered to me. I’m nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett,
the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too;
there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls’
playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring.”

“You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes there is
something in a fresh start: we’re on the straight road as a nation,
in most respects; we haven’t any picturesque old prescribed lanes to
travel. So you think that makes up?”

“It’s one thing. You might put down space--elbow-room.”

“An empty horizon,” Advena murmured.

“For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England
has filled hers up. She has now--these,” and he nodded at a window open
to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.

“Oh, if you have a creative imagination,” she said “like Wallingham’s.
But even then your vision must be only political economic, material. You
can’t conceive the--flowers--that will come out of all that. And if you
could it wouldn’t be like having them.”

“And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered
by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in
England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid,
buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the
plenty of things!”

“I am to be consoled because apples are cheap.”

“You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn’t it console you
to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense
amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?”

“No,” said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle
didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look
at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said--

“And those things aren’t all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the
human spirit, as it is set free in these wide unblemished spaces, may be
something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is
good and beautiful--”

He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no
more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful
blush.

“I am glad you are so well satisfied,” she said, and then, as if her
words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.

Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.



CHAPTER XV

If it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted
to draw the history of Lorne Murchison’s sojourn in England from his
letters home. He put his whole heart into these, his discoveries and his
recognitions and his young enthusiasm, all his claimed inheritance, all
that he found to criticize and to love. His mother said, half-jealously
when she read them, that he seemed tremendously taken up with the old
country; and of course she expressed the thing exactly, as she always
did: he was tremendously taken up with it. The old country fell into the
lines of his imagination, from the towers of Westminster to the shops
in the Strand; from the Right Hon. Fawcett Wallingham, who laid great
issues before the public, to the man who sang melancholy hymns to the
same public up and down the benevolent streets. It was naturally London
that filled his view; his business was in London and his time was short;
the country he saw from the train, whence it made a low cloudy frame for
London, with decorations of hedges and sheep. How he saw London, how he
carried away all he did in the time and under the circumstances, may
be thought a mystery; there are doubtless people who would consider his
opportunities too limited to gather anything essential. Cruickshank was
the only one of the deputation who had been “over” before; and they all
followed him unquestioningly to the temperance hotel of his preference
in Bloomsbury, where bedrooms were three and six and tea was understood
as a solid meal and the last in the day. Bates would have voted for the
Metropole, and McGill had been advised that you saw a good deal of life
at the Cecil, but they bowed to Cruickshank’s experience. None of them
were total abstainers, but neither had any of them the wine habit; they
were not inconvenienced, therefore, in taking advantage of the cheapness
with which total abstinence made itself attractive, and they took it,
though they were substantial men. As one of them put it, they weren’t
over there to make a splash, a thing that was pretty hard to do in
London, anyhow; and home comforts came before anything. The conviction
about the splash was perhaps a little the teaching of circumstances.
They were influential fellows at home, who had lived for years in the
atmosphere of appreciation that surrounds success; their movements were
observed in the newspapers; their names stood for wide interests, big
concerns. They had known the satisfaction of a positive importance,
not only in their community but in their country; and they had come to
England invested as well with the weight that is attached to a public
mission. It may very well be that they looked for some echo of what they
were accustomed to, and were a little dashed not to find it--to find the
merest published announcement of their arrival, and their introduction
by Lord Selkirk to the Colonial Secretary; and no heads turned in the
temperance hotel when they came into the dining-room. It may very well
be. It is even more certain, however that they took the lesson as they
found it, with the quick eye for things as they are which seems to
come of looking at things as they will be, and with just that humorous
comment about the splash. It would be misleading to say that they were
humbled; I doubt whether they even felt their relativity, whether they
ever dropped consciously, there in the Bloomsbury hotel, into their
places in the great scale of London. Observing the scale, recognizing
it, they held themselves unaffected by it; they kept, in a curious,
positive way, the integrity of what they were and what they had come
for; they maintained their point of view. So much must be conceded. The
Empire produces a family resemblance, but here and there, when oceans
intervene, a different mould of the spirit.

Wallingham certainly invited them to dinner one Sunday, in a body, an
occasion which gave one or two of them some anxiety until they found
that it was not to be adorned by the ladies of the family. Tricorne
was there, President of the Board of Trade, and Fleming, who held the
purse-strings of the United Kingdom, two Ministers whom Wallingham had
asked because they were supposed to have open minds--open, that is to
say, for purposes of assimilation. Wallingham considered, and rightly,
that he had done very well for the deputation in getting these two.
There were other “colleagues” whose attendance he would have liked to
compel; but one of them, deep in the country, was devoting his weekends
to his new French motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon
Neglected Periods of Mahommedan History, and both were at the breaking
strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the deputation to dinner. Lord
Selkirk, who took them to Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them
to one of those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he was
so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard about, upon which
royalty was present in two generations. They travelled to it by special
train, a circumstance which made them grave, receptive, and even
slightly ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty on his
hands, naturally could not give them much of his time, and they moved
about in a cluster, avoiding the ladies’ trains and advising one another
that it was a good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large
private means; it wasn’t everybody that could afford to take the job.
Yet they were not wholly detached from the occasion; they looked at it,
after they had taken it in, with an air half-amused, half-proprietary.
All this had, in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs.
One of them--Bates it was--responding to a lady who was effusive about
the strawberries, even took the modestly depreciatory attitude of the
host. “They’re a fair size for this country, ma’am, but if you want
berries with a flavour we’ll do better for you in the Niagara district.”

It must be added that Cruickshank lunched with Wallingham at his club,
and with Tricorne at his; and on both occasions the quiet and attentive
young secretary went with him, for purposes of reference, his pocket
bulging with memoranda. The young secretary felt a little embarrassed
to justify his presence at Tricorne’s lunch, as the Right Honourable
gentleman seemed to have forgotten what his guests had come for beyond
it, and talked exclusively and exhaustively about the new possibilities
for fruit-farming in England. Cruickshank fairly shook himself into
his overcoat with irritation afterward. “It’s the sort of thing we must
except,” he said, as they merged upon Pall Mall. It was not the sort of
thing Lorne expected; but we know him unsophisticated and a stranger
to the heart of the Empire, which beats through such impediment
of accumulated tissue. Nor was it the sort of thing they got from
Wallingham, the keen-eyed and probing, whose skill in adjusting
conflicting interests could astonish even their expectation, and whose
vision of the essentials of the future could lift even their enthusiasm.
One would like to linger over their touch with Wallingham, that fusion
of energy with energy, that straight, satisfying, accomplishing dart.
There is more drama here; no doubt, than in all the pages that are to
come. But I am explaining now how little, not how much, the Cruickshank
deputation, and especially Lorne Murchison, had the opportunity of
feeling and learning in London, in order to show how wonderful it was
that Lorne felt and learned so widely. That, what he absorbed and
took back with him is, after all, what we have to do with; his actual
adventures are of no great importance.

The deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire had few
points of contact with the great world, but its members were drawn
into engagements of their own, more, indeed, than some of them could
conveniently overtake. Mr Bates never saw his niece in the post-office,
and regrets it to this day. The engagements arose partly out of business
relations. Poulton who was a dyspeptic, complained that nothing could be
got through in London without eating and drinking; for his part he would
concede a point any time not to eat and drink, but you could not do it;
you just had to suffer. Poulton was a principal in one of the railway
companies that were competing to open up the country south of Hudson’s
Bay to the Pacific, but having dealt with that circumstance in the
course of the day he desired only to be allowed to go to bed on bread
and butter and a little stewed fruit. Bates, whose name was a nightmare
to every other dry-goods man in Toronto, naturally had to see a good
many of the wholesale people; he, too, complained of the number
of courses and the variety of the wines, but only to disguise his
gratification. McGill, of the Great Bear Line, had big proposals to
make in connection with southern railway freights from Liverpool; and
Cameron, for private reasons of magnitude, proposed to ascertain
the real probability of a duty to foreigners on certain forms of
manufactured leather--he turned out in Toronto a very good class of
suitcase. Cruickshank had private connections to which they were all
respectful. Nobody but Cruickshank found it expedient to look up the
lost leader of the Canadian House of Commons, contributed to a cause
still more completely lost in home politics; nobody but Cruickshank was
likely to be asked to dine by a former Governor-General of the Dominion,
an invitation which nobody but Cruickshank would be likely to refuse.

“It used to be a ‘command’ in Ottawa,” said Cruickshank, who had got on
badly with his sovereign’s representative there, “but here it’s only a
privilege. There’s no business in it, and I haven’t time for pleasure.”

The nobleman in question had, in effect, dropped back into the Lords. So
far as the Empire was concerned, he was in the impressive rearguard, and
this was a little company of fighting men.

The entertainments arising out of business were usually on a scale more
or less sumptuous. They took place in big, well-known restaurants, and
included a look at many of the people who seem to lend themselves so
willingly to the great buzzing show that anybody can pay for in London,
their names in the paper in the morning, their faces at Prince’s in the
evening, their personalities no doubt advantageously exposed in various
places during the day. But there were others, humbler ones in Earl’s
Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had
relatives whom it was natural to hunt up. Long years and many billows
had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the
whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to
seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and
perhaps--such is our vanity in the new lands--to show them what the
stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits:
the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to
have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping,
trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and
mind, which somehow one didn’t see much over home.

“England,” said Poulton, the Canadian-born, “is a dangerous country to
live in; you run such risks of growing old.” They agreed, I fear, for
more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early;
and you cannot blame them--there was not one of them who did not offer
in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance
grew dramatic in their eyes.

“I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed,”
 said McGill. “Great Scott, if I’d taken that clerkship!” He saw all his
glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.

“I was kicked out,” said Cameron, “and it was the kindest attention my
father ever paid me;” and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out
second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.

The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted
them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction
at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further
spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly
old-fashioned ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the
market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial
sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain and had, as they
would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend themselves
on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of
them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them
and submitted to them.

Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further; only he was
alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.



CHAPTER XVI

Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the
deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms
and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in
a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but their
secretary had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance that
was taken account of. In these respects, no less than in the others, he
justified Mr Cruickshank’s selection. He did his work as unobtrusively
as he did it admirably well; and for the rest he was just washed
about, carried, hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses,
receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to
the bus drivers--he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted
to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick
London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked
them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself
after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he
wasn’t an American. “Yes,” he would say in the end, “but not the United
States kind,” resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside
him that there were other kinds. The imperial idea goes so quickly from
the heart to the head. He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his
denial to the bus drivers.

“I expect it’s the next best thing.” he would say, “but it’s only the
next best.”

It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of
Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on
the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.

One introduction of his own he had. Mrs Milburn had got it for him from
the rector, Mr Emmett, to his wife’s brother, Mr Charles Chafe, who
had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off
presenting the letter--did not know, indeed, quite how to present it,
till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with
it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr Chafe’s works at Chiswick.
He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he
met Mrs Chafe and the family, when he also met Mr Alfred Hesketh. Lorne
went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh--a
nephew--was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter
interesting on both sides. He--Hesketh--was a young man with a good
public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate
degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the
capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present
occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to
it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always
the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite
one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for
politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public
service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally
into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected
on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were
doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick.
Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long
enough.

Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh’s age in Hesketh’s
condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement;
poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth
he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence,
equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in
fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had
intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any
impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was
still under his father’s roof, but that was for the general happiness;
any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry
fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by
a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still
fidgeting at the starting-point.

“Why don’t you farm?” he asked once.

“Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I
can’t wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn’t you?”

“Well,” said Lorne, “in your case it seems about the only thing left. I?
Oh it doesn’t attract us over there. We’re getting away from it--leaving
it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when
our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?”

Hesketh’s situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had
a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere
short of the flag. The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the
public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it
was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it
travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which
the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth.
They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at
Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was
self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms,
called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it
against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down
the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in
the Cabinet, sore travail among private members. The conception being
ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion,
fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully
formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination.
Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the
insular fog; they shed a brilliance and infectious enthusiasm, but there
were not enough to do more than make the fog visible. Many persons found
such torches irritating. They pointed out that as England had groped
to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further.
“Free trade,” they said, “has made us what we are. Put out these
lights!”

Mr Chafe was one of these. He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of
Burgundy and distrust. The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with
suspicion and hostility. He could accept the American tariff on English
manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full
in the face, not to be dodged. But the offer of better business in the
English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign
countries--he could see too deep for that. The colonials might or might
not be good customers; he knew how many decanters he sold in the United
States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was
being commended to the working-man with the argument of higher wages.
Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one
word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher
wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty
years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing
beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British
manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving
workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms
of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. “Give
them cheap food and keep them poor,” was the sum of his advice. His
opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: he was one
of the people whom Wallingham’s scheme in its legitimate development of
a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact,
which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look
like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business
had survived free trade--though he would not say this either--and he
preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any
zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in
Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies--Mr
Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He
reversed the figure and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all
the argument he wanted.

Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had
stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he
was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma
of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic
thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven
the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to
carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract
him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England.
The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old
insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his
own case he freely translated into his country’s, and offered an open
mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new
countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic
leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what
nature intended to be the eye of a practical businessman. He looked
at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical
attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the
better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of
the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation.
Hesketh’s open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as
he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne
Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same
thing.

Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and
Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph.
Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied
in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the
second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early
impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals
disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne
knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were
good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian read
the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.

“As an Englishman,” said Hesketh one evening as they walked together
back from the Chafes’ along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged
by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, “I could wish
the idea were more our own--that we were pressing it on the colonies
instead of the colonies pressing it on us.”

“Doesn’t there come a time in the history of most families,” Lorne
replied, “when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them
in touch with the times? Why shouldn’t a vigorous policy of Empire be
conceived by its younger nations--who have the ultimate resources to
carry it out? We’ve got them and we know it--the iron and the coal
and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem
cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you
can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of
forty million people, whom she can’t feed and is less and less able to
find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment--a
penalty. It’s something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it,
something to bargain with; but even as a market it can’t preponderate
always, and I can’t see why it should make such tremendous claims.”

“England isn’t superannuated yet, Murchison.”

“Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn’t as young as she
was, and it does seem to me--”

“What seems to you?”

“Well, I’m no economist, and I don’t know how far to trust my
impressions, and you needn’t tell me I’m a rank outsider, for I know
that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it’s from
the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this
country has got to come. England still has military initiative, though
it’s hard to see how she’s going to keep that unless she does something
to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but
what other kind do we hear about? Company-promoting, bee-keeping,
asparagus-growing, poultry-farming for ladies, the opening of a new
Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four
and six, and Japanese attendants who take the change on their hands and
knees. London’s one great stomach--how many eating places have we passed
in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new
ways of making rich people more comfortable and better-amused--I’m fed
up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on ‘em,
wooden-smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a
dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend
the money there is in the country already; and about the only line
of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that
accumulation. London isn’t the headquarters for big new developing
enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London
is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices,
and shops. That sort of thing can’t go on for ever. Already capital
is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in--steel works in
Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you
know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa?
Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that’s a fact; the money will
go, and the people will go, anyhow. It’s only a case of whether England
sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she
lets them slip away in spite of her.”

“I dare say it will,” replied Hesketh; “I’ve got precious little, but
what there is I’d take out fast enough, if I saw a decent chance of
investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or
three fellows in my year went over there and aren’t making half a bad
thing of it.”

“Oh, come,” said Lorne, half-swinging round upon the other, with his
hands in his pockets, “it isn’t exactly the time, is it, to talk about
chucking the Empire?”

“Well, no, it isn’t,” Hesketh admitted. “One might do better to wait,
I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to
Wallingham.”

They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out
again.

“I suppose it’s unreasonable, but there’s nothing I hate so much as to
hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States.”

“It’s risky, I admit. And I’ve never heard anybody yet say it was
comfortable.”

“In a few years, fifty maybe, it won’t matter. Things will have taken
their direction by then; but now it’s a question of the lead. The
Americans think they’ve got it, and unless we get imperial federation
of course they have. It’s their plain intention to capture England
commercially.”

“We’re a long way from that,” said Hesketh.

“Yes, but it’s in the line of fate. Industrial energy is deserting this
country; and you have no large movement, no counter-advance, to make
against the increasing forces that are driving this way from over
there--nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and
doesn’t seem to know it. She’s so great--Hesketh, it’s pathetic!--she
offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly
blindness, above all to Americans, whom she patronizes in the gate.”

“I believe we do patronize them,” said Hesketh. “It’s rotten bad form.”

“Oh, form! I may be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a
lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and
to precedent--‘the mainstay of the mandarin’ one of the papers calls
it; that’s a good word--that give one the feeling that this kingdom is
beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies,
of course, in the great West, where the corn and the cattle grow; and
between Winnipeg and Chicago choose quickly, England!”

His companion laughed. “Oh, I’m with you,” he said, “but you take a
pessimistic view of this country, Murchison.”

“It depends on what you call pessimism,” Lorne rejoined. “I see England
down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world.
and the Mecca of the race.”



CHAPTER XVII

The Cruickshank deputation returned across that North Atlantic which it
was their desire to see so much more than ever the track of the flag,
toward the middle of July. The shiny carriages were still rolling about
in great numbers when they left; London’s air of luxury had thickened
with the advancing season and hung heavily in the streets; people had
begun to picnic in the Park on Sundays. They had been from the beginning
a source of wonder and of depression to Lorne Murchison, the people
in the Park, those, I mean, who walked and sat and stood there for the
refreshment of their lives, for whom the place has a lyrical value
as real as it is unconscious. He noted them ranged on formal benches,
quiet, respectable, absorptive, or gathered heavily, shoulder to
shoulder, docile under the tutelage of policemen, listening to anyone
who would lift a voice to speak to them. London, beating on all borders,
hemmed them in; England outside seemed hardly to contain for them a
wider space. Lorne, with his soul full of free airs and forest
depths, never failed to respond to a note in the Park that left him
heavy-hearted, longing for an automatic distributing system for the
Empire. When he saw them bring their spirit-lamps and kettles and
sit down in little companies on four square yards of turf, under
the blackened branches, in the roar of the traffic, he went back to
Bloomsbury to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live with
that enduring spectacle.

They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their faces to the West
again. The unready conception of things, the political concentration
upon parish affairs, the cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them
with its dull anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish
overpopulation clouded their eager outlook. These conditions might have
been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison was the only one who
thanked Heaven consciously that it was not so; but there was no man
among them whose pulse did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the
deck of the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool, because he
had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of staying, of “settling,” though
such a course was practicable to any of them except Lorne. They were
all rich enough to take the advantages that money brings in England, the
comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add their wealth
to the sumptuous side of the dramatic contrast. I doubt whether the idea
even presented itself. It is the American who takes up his appreciative
residence in England. He comes as a foreigner, observant, amused, having
disclaimed responsibility for a hundred years. His detachment is as
complete as it would be in Italy, with the added pleasure of easy
comprehension. But homecomers from Greater Britain have never been
cut off, still feel their uneasy share in all that is, and draw a long
breath of relief as they turn again to their life in the lands where
they found wider scope and different opportunities, and that new quality
in the blood which made them different men.

The deputation had accomplished a good deal; less, Cruickshank said,
than he had hoped, but more than he had expected. They had obtained
the promise of concessions for Atlantic services, both mail and certain
classes of freight, by being able to demonstrate a generous policy on
their own side. Pacific communications the home Government was more
chary of; there were matters to be fought out with Australia. The
Pacific was further away, as Cruickshank said, and you naturally can’t
get fellows who have never been there to see the country under the
Selkirks and south of the Bay--any of them except Wallingham, who had
never been there either, but whose imagination took views of the falcon.
They were reinforced by news of a shipping combination in Montreal to
lower freights to South Africa against the Americans; it wasn’t news to
them, some of them were in it; but it was to the public, and it helped
the sentiment of their aim, the feather on the arrow. They had secured
something, both financially and morally; what best pleased them,
perhaps, was the extent to which they got their scheme discussed. Here
Lorne had been invaluable; Murchison had done more with the newspapers,
they agreed, than any of them with Cabinet Ministers. The journalist
everywhere is perhaps more accessible to ideas, more susceptible to
enthusiasm, than his fellows, and Lorne was charged with the object of
his deputation in its most communicable, most captivating form. At all
events, he came to excellent understanding, whether of agreement or
opposition, with the newspapermen he met--Cruickshank knew a good
many of them and these occasions were more fruitful than the official
ones--and there is no doubt that the guarded approval of certain leading
columns had fewer ifs and buts and other qualifications in consequence,
while the disapproval of others was marked by a kind of unwilling
sympathy and a freely accorded respect. Lorne found London editors
surprisingly unbiased, London newspapers surprisingly untrammelled.
They seemed to him to suffer from no dictated views, no interests in the
background or special local circumstances. They had open minds, most of
them, and when a cloud appeared it was seldom more than a prejudice. It
was only his impression, and perhaps it would not stand cynical inquiry;
but he had a grateful conviction that the English Press occupied in the
main a lofty and impartial ground of opinion, from which it desired only
a view of the facts in their true proportion. On his return he confided
it to Horace Williams, who scoffed and ran the national politics of the
Express in the local interests of Fox County as hard as ever; but it had
fallen in with Lorne’s beautiful beliefs about England, and he clung to
it for years.

The Williamses had come over the second evening following Lorne’s
arrival, after tea. Rawlins had gone to the station, just to see that
the Express would make no mistake in announcing that Mr L. Murchison had
“Returned to the Paternal Roof,” and the Express had announced it,
with due congratulation. Family feeling demanded that for the first
twenty-four hours he should be left to his immediate circle, but people
had been dropping in all the next day at the office, and now came the
Williamses “trapesing,” as Mrs Murchison said, across the grass, though
she was too content to make it more than a private grievance, to where
they all sat on the verandah.

“What I don’t understand,” Horace Williams said to Mr Murchison, “was
why you didn’t give him a blow on the whistle. You and Milburn and a few
others might have got up quite a toot. You don’t get the secretary to a
deputation for tying up the Empire home every day.”

“You did that for him in the Express,” said John Murchison, smiling as
he pressed down, with an accustomed thumb, the tobacco into his pipe.

“Oh, we said nothing at all! Wait till he’s returned for South Fox,”
 Williams responded jocularly.

“Why not the Imperial Council--of the future--at Westminster while
you’re about it?” remarked Lorne, flipping a pebble back upon the gravel
path.

“That will keep, my son. But one of these days, you mark my words, Mr
L. Murchison will travel to Elgin Station with flags on his engine and
he’ll be very much surprised to find the band there, and a large number
of his fellow-citizens, all able-bodied shouting men, and every factory
whistle in Elgin let off at once, to say nothing of kids with tin ones.
And if the Murchison Stove and Furnace Works siren stands out of that
occasion I’ll break in and pull it myself.”

“It won’t stand out,” Stella assured him. “I’ll attend to it. Don’t you
worry.”

“I suppose you had a lovely time, Mr Murchison?” said Mrs Williams,
gently tilting to and fro in a rocking-chair, with her pretty feet
in their American shoes well in evidence. It is a fact, or perhaps
a parable, that should be interesting to political economists, the
adaptability of Canadian feet to American shoes; but fortunately it is
not our present business. Though I must add that the “rocker” was also
American; and the hammock in which Stella reposed came from New York;
and upon John Murchison’s knee, with the local journal, lay a pink
evening paper published in Buffalo.

“Better than I can tell you, Mrs Williams, in all sorts of ways. But
it’s good to be back, too. Very good!” Lorne threw up his head and drew
in the pleasant evening air of midsummer with infinite relish while his
eye travelled contentedly past the chestnuts on the lawn, down the vista
of the quiet tree-bordered street. It lay empty in the solace of
the evening, a blue hill crossed it in the distance, and gave it an
unfettered look, the wind stirred in the maples. A pair of schoolgirls
strolled up and down bareheaded; now and then a buggy passed.

“There’s room here,” he said.

“Find it kind of crowded up over there?” asked Mr Williams. “Worse than
New York?”

“Oh, yes. Crowded in a patient sort of way--it’s enough to break your
heart--that you don’t see in New York! The poor of New York--well,
they’ve got the idea of not being poor. In England they’re resigned,
they’ve got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over
there--you can SEE they’re used to it, see it in the way they slope
along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don’t understand
it, but they’ve just got to take it! Crowded? Rather!”

“We don’t say ‘rather’ in this country, mister,” observed Stella.

“Well, you can say it now, kiddie.”

They laughed at the little passage--the traveller’s importation of one
or two Britishisms had been the subject of skirmish before--but silence
fell among them for a moment afterward. They all had in the blood the
remembrance of what Lorne had seen.

“Well, you’ve been doing big business,” said Horace Williams.

Lorne shook his head. “We haven’t done any harm,” he said, “but our
scheme’s away out of sight now. At least it ought to be.”

“Lost in the bigger issue.” said Williams, and Lorne nodded.

The bigger issue had indeed in the meantime obscured the political
horizon, and was widely spreading. A mere colonial project might
well disappear in it. England was absorbed in a single contemplation.
Wallingham, though he still supported the disabilities of a right
honourable evangelist with a gospel of his own, was making astonishing
conversions; the edifice of the national economic creed seemed coming
over at the top. It was a question of the resistance of the base, and
the world was watching.

“Cruickshank says if the main question had been sprung a month ago we
wouldn’t have gone over. As it is, on several points we’ve got to wait.
If they reject the preferential trade idea over there we shall have done
a little good, for any government would be disposed to try to patch up
something to take the place of imperial union in that case; and a few
thousands more for shipping subsidies and cheap cablegrams would have
a great look of strengthening the ties with the colonies. But if they
commit themselves to a zollverein with us and the rest of the family
you won’t hear much more about the need to foster communications.
Communications will foster themselves.”

“Just so,” remarked John Murchison. “They’ll save their money.”

“I wouldn’t think so before--I couldn’t,” Lorne went on, “but I’m afraid
it’s rather futile, the kind of thing we’ve been trying to do. It’s
fiddling at a superstructure without a foundation. What we want is the
common interest. Common interest, common taxation for defence, common
representation, domestic management of domestic affairs, and you’ve got
a working Empire.”

“Just as easy as slippin’ off a log,” remarked Horace Williams.

“Common interest, yes,” said his father; “common taxation, no, for
defence or any other purpose. The colonies will never send money to be
squandered by the London War Office. We’ll defend ourselves, as soon
as we can manage it, and buy our own guns and our own cruisers. We’re
better business people than they are, and we know it.”

“I guess that’s right, Mr Murchison,” said Horace Williams. “Our own
army and navy--in the sweet bye-and-bye. And let ‘em understand they’ll
be welcome to the use of it, but quite in a family way--no sort of
compulsion.”

“Well,” said Lorne, “that’s compatible enough.”

“And your domestic affairs must include the tariff,” Mr Murchison went
on. “There’s no such possibility as a tariff that will go round. And
tariffs are kittle cattle to shoo behind.”

“Has anybody got a Scotch dictionary?” inquired Stella. “This
conversation is making me tired.”

“Suppose you run away and play with your hoop,” suggested her brother.
“I can’t see that as an insuperable difficulty, Father. Tariffs could
be made adaptable, relative to the common interest as well as to the
individual one. We could do it if we liked.”

“Your adaptability might easily lead to other things. What’s to prevent
retaliation among ourselves? There’s a slump in textiles, and the
home Government is forced to let in foreign wool cheaper. Up goes the
Australian tax on the output of every mill in Lancashire. The last state
of the Empire might be worse than the first.”

“It wouldn’t be serious. If I pinched Stella’s leg as I’m going to in a
minute, she will no doubt kick me; and her instincts are such that she
will probably kick me with the leg I pinched, but that won’t prevent our
going to the football match together tomorrow and presenting a united
front to the world.”

They all laughed, and Stella pulled down her lengthening petticoats with
an air of great offence, but John Murchison shook his head.

“If they manage it, they will be clever,” he said.

“Talking of Lancashire,” said Williams, “there are some funny fellows
over there writing in the Press against a tax on foreign cotton because
it’s going to ruin Lancashire. And at this very minute thousands of
looms are shut down in Lancashire because of the high price of cotton
produced by an American combine--and worse coming, sevenpence a pound
I hear they’re going to have it, against the fourpence ha’penny they’ve
got it up to already. That’s the sort of thing they’re afraid to
discourage by a duty.”

“Would a duty discourage it?” asked John Murchison.

“Why not--if they let British-grown cotton in free? They won’t
discourage the combine much--that form of enterprise has got to be
tackled where it grows; but the Yankee isn’t the only person in the
world that can get to understand it. What’s to prevent preferential
conditions creating British combines, to compete with the American
article, and what’s to prevent Lancashire getting cheaper cotton in
consequence? Two combines are better than one monopoly any day.”

“May be so. It would want looking into. We won’t see a duty on cotton
though, or wool either for that matter. The manufacturers would be
pleased enough to get it on the stuff they make, but there would be a
fine outcry against taxing the stuff they use.”

“Did you see much of the aristocracy, Mr Murchison?” asked Mrs Williams.

“No,” replied Lorne, “but I saw Wallingham.”

“You saw the whole House of Lords,” interposed Stella, “and you were
introduced to three.”

“Well, yes, that’s so. Fine-looking set of old chaps they are, too.
We’re a little too funny over here about the Lords--we haven’t had to
make any.”

“What were they doing the day you were there, Lorne?” asked Williams.

“Motorcar legislation,” replied Lorne. “Considerably excited about it,
too. One of them had had three dogs killed on his estate. I saw his
letter about it in the Times.”

“I don’t see anything to laugh at in that,” declared Stella. “Dogs are
dogs.”

“They are, sister, especially in England.”

“Laundresses aren’t washerwomen there,” observed Mrs Murchison. “I’d
like you to see the colour of the things he’s brought home with him, Mrs
Williams. Clean or dirty, to the laundry they go--weeks it will take to
get them right again--ingrained London smut and nothing else.”

“In this preference business they’ve got to lead the way,” Williams
reverted. “We’re not so grown up but what grandma’s got to march in
front. Now, from your exhaustive observation of Great Britain, extending
over a period of six weeks, is she going to?”

“My exhaustive observation,” said Lorne, smiling, “enables me to tell
you one thing with absolute accuracy; and that is that nobody knows.
They adore Wallingham over there--he’s pretty nearly a god--and
they’d like to do as he tells them, and they’re dead sick of theoretic
politics; but they’re afraid--oh, they’re afraid!”

“They’ll do well to ca’ canny,” said John Murchison.

“There’s two things in the way, at a glance,” Lorne went on. “The
conservatism of the people--it isn’t a name, it’s a fact--the hostility
and suspicion; natural enough: they know they’re stupid, and they half
suspect they’re fair game. I suppose the Americans have taught them
that. Slow--oh, slow! More interested in the back-garden fence than
anything else. Pick up a paper, at the moment when things are being
done, mind, all over the world, done against them--when their shipping
is being captured, and their industries destroyed, and their goods
undersold beneath their very noses--and the thing they want to know
is--Why Are the Swallows Late? I read it myself, in a ha’penny morning
paper, too--that they think rather dangerously go-ahead--a whole column,
headed, to inquire what’s the matter with the swallows. The Times the
same week had a useful leader on Alterations in the Church Service, and
a special contribution on Prayers for the Dead. Lord, they need ‘em!
Those are the things they THINK about! The session’s nearly over, and
there’s two Church Discipline Bills, and five Church Bills--bishoprics
and benefices, and Lord knows what--still to get through. Lot of anxiety
about ‘em, apparently! As to a business view of politics, I expect the
climate’s against it. They’ll see over a thing--they’re fond of doing
that--or under it, or round one side of it, but they don’t seem to
have any way of seeing THROUGH it. What they just love is a good round
catchword; they’ve only got to hear themselves say it often enough, and
they’ll take it for gospel. They’re convinced out of their own mouths.
There was the driver of a bus I used to ride on pretty often, and if he
felt like talking, he’d always begin, ‘As I was a-saying of yesterday--’
Well, that’s the general idea--to repeat what they were a-sayin’ of
yesterday; and it doesn’t matter two cents that the rest of the world
has changed the subject. They’ve been a-sayin’ a long time that they
object to import duties of any sort or kind, and you won’t get them to
SEE the business in changing. If they do this it won’t be because they
want to, it will be because Wallingham wants them to.”

“I guess that’s so,” said Williams. “And if Wallingham gets them to he
ought to have a statue in every capital in the Empire. He will, too.
Good cigar this, Lorne! Where’d you get it?”

“They are Indian cheroots--‘Planters,’ they call ‘em--made in Madras.
I got some through a man named Hesketh, who has friends out there, at a
price you wouldn’t believe for as decent a smoke. You can’t buy ‘em in
London; but you will all right, and here, too, as soon as we’ve got the
sense to favour British-grown tobacco.”

“Lorne appreciates his family better than he did before,” remarked his
youngest sister, “because we’re British grown.”

“You were saying you noticed two things specially in the way?” said his
father.

“Oh, the other’s of course the awful poverty--the twelve millions that
haven’t got enough to do with. I expect it’s an outside figure and it
covers all sorts of qualifying circumstances; but it’s the one the Free
Fooders quote, and it’s the one Wallingham will have to handle. They’ve
muddled along until they’ve GOT twelve million people in that condition,
and now they have to carry on with the handicap. We ask them to put a
tax on foreign food to develop our wheat areas and cattle ranges.
We say, ‘Give us a chance and we’ll feed you and take your surplus
population.’ What is to be done with the twelve million while we are
growing the wheat? The colonies offer to create prosperity for everybody
concerned at a certain outlay--we’ve got the raw materials--and they
can’t afford the investment because of the twelve millions, and what may
happen meanwhile. They can’t face the meanwhile--that’s what it comes
to.”

“Fine old crop of catchwords in that situation,” Mr Williams remarked;
and his eye had the spark of the practical politician. “Can’t you hear
‘em at it, eh?”

“It scares them out of everything but hand-to-mouth politics. Any other
remedy is too heroic. They go on pointing out and contemplating and
grieving, with their percentages of misery and degeneration; and they go
on poulticing the cancer with benevolence--there are people over there
who want the State to feed the schoolchildren! Oh, they’re kind, good,
big-hearted people; and they’ve got the idea that if they can only give
enough away everything will come right. I was talking with a man one
day, and I asked him whether the existence of any class justified
governing a great country on the principle of an almshouse. He asked
me who the almsgivers ought to be, in any country. Of course it was
tampering with my figure--in an almshouse there aren’t any; but that’s
the way it presents itself to the best of them. Another fellow was
frantic at the idea of a tax on foreign food--he nearly cried--but would
be very glad to see the Government do more to assist emigration to the
colonies. I tried to show him it would be better to make it profitable
to emigrate first, but I couldn’t make him see it.

“Oh, and there’s the old thing against them, of course--the handling of
imperial and local affairs by one body. Anybody’s good enough to attend
to the Baghdad Railway, and nobody’s too good to attend to the town
pump. Is it any wonder the Germans beat them in their own shops and
Russia walks into Thibet? The eternal marvel is that they stand where
they do.”

“At the top,” said Mr Williams.

“Oh--at the top! Think of what you mean when you say ‘England.’”

“I see that the demand for a tariff on manufactured goods is growing,”
 Williams remarked, “even the anti-food-tax organs are beginning to shout
for that.”

“If they had put it on twenty years ago,” said Lorne, “there would be no
twelve million people making a problem for want of work, and it would be
a good deal easier to do imperial business today.”

“You’ll find,” said John Murchison, removing his pipe, “that
protection’ll have to come first over there. They’ll put up a fence
and save their trade--in their own good time, not next week or next
year--and when they’ve done that they’ll talk to us about our big
ideas--not before. And if Wallingham hadn’t frightened them with the
imperial job, he never would have got them to take up the other. It’s
just his way of getting both done.”

“I hope you’re right, Father,” said Lorne, with a covert glance at his
watch. “Horace--Mrs Williams--I’ll have to get you to excuse me. I have
an engagement at eight.”

He left them with a happy spring in his step, left them looking after
him, talking of him, with pride and congratulation. Only Stella, with
a severe lip and a disapproving eye, noted the direction he took as he
left the house.



CHAPTER XVIII

Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox
Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out
beside it, twice every Sunday for twenty years. He was a small spare
man, with thin grey hair that fell back from the narrow dome of his
forehead to his coat collar, decent and severe. He ascended the pulpit
exactly three minutes before the minister did; and the dignity with
which he put one foot before the other made his appearance a ceremonious
feature of the service and a thing quoted. “I was there before Peter”
 was a triumphant evidence of punctuality. Dr Drummond would have liked
to make it a test. It seemed to him no great thing to expect the people
of Knox Church to be there before Peter.

Macfarlane was also in attendance in the vestry to help the minister off
with his gown and hang it up. Dr Drummond’s gown needed neither helping
nor hanging; the Doctor was deftness and neatness and impatience itself,
and would have it on the hook with his own hands, and never a fold
crooked. After Mr Finlay, on the contrary, Peter would have to pick up
and smooth out--ten to one the garment would be flung on a chair. Still,
he was invariably standing by to see it flung, and to hand Mr Finlay his
hat and stick. He was surprised and put about to find himself one Sunday
evening too late for this attendance. The vestry was empty, the gown
was on the floor. Peter gathered it up with as perturbed an air as if Mr
Finlay had omitted a point of church observance. “I doubt they get into
slack ways in these missions,” said Peter. He had been unable, with Dr
Drummond, to see the necessity for such extensions.

Meanwhile Hugh Finlay, in secular attire, had left the church by the
vestry door, and was rapidly overtaking groups of his hearers as they
walked homeward. He was unusually aware of his change of dress because
of a letter in the inside pocket of his coat. The letter, in that
intimate place, spread a region of consciousness round it which hastened
his blood and his step. There was purpose in his whole bearing; Advena
Murchison, looking back at some suggestion of Lorne’s, caught it, and
lost for a moment the meaning of what she said. When he overtook them,
with plain intention, she walked beside the two men, withdrawn and
silent, like a child. It was unexpected and overwhelming, his joining
them after the service, accompanying them, as it were, in the flesh
after having led them so far in the spirit; he had never done it before.
She felt her heart confronted with a new, an immediate issue, and
suddenly afraid. It shrank from the charge for which it longed, and
would have fled; yet, paralysed with delight, it kept time with her
sauntering feet.

They talked of the sermon, which had been strongly tinged with the issue
of the day. Dreamer as he was by temperament, Finlay held to the wisdom
of informing great public questions with the religious idea, vigorously
disclaimed that it was anywhere inadmissible.

“You’ll have to settle with the Doctor, Mr Finlay,” Lorne warned him
gaily, “if you talk politics in Knox Church. He thinks he never does.”

“Do you think,” said Finlay, “that he would object to--to one’s going as
far afield as I did tonight?”

“He oughtn’t to,” said Lorne. “You should have heard him when old Sir
John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to
the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation
couldn’t say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits.”

Finlay smiled gravely. “Political convictions are a man’s birthright,”
 he said. “Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them. But
of course there are limits beyond which pulpit influence should not go,
and I am sure Dr Drummond has the clearest perception of them. He seems
to have been a wonderful fellow, Macdonald, a man with extraordinary
power of imaginative enterprise. I wonder whether he would have seen his
way to linking up the Empire as he linked up your Provinces here?”

“He’d have hated uncommonly to be in opposition, but I don’t see how
he could have helped it,” Lorne said. “He was the godfather of Canadian
manufacturers, you know--the Tories have always been the industrial
party. He couldn’t have gone for letting English stuff in free, or
cheap; and yet he was genuinely loyal and attached to England. He would
discriminate against Manchester with tears in his eyes! Imperialist in
his time spelled Conservative, now it spells Liberal. The Conservatives
have always talked the loudest about the British bond, but when it
lately came to doing we’re on record on the right side, and they’re on
record on the wrong. But it must make the old man’s ghost sick to see--”

“To see his court suit stolen,” Advena finished for him. “As Disraeli
said--wasn’t it Disraeli?” She heard, and hated the note of constraint
in her voice. “Am I reduced,” she thought, indignantly, “to falsetto?”
 and chose, since she must choose, the betrayal of silence.

“It did one good to hear the question discussed on the higher level,”
 said Lorne. “You would think, to read the papers, that all its merits
could be put into dollars and cents.”

“I’ve noticed some of them in terms of sentiment--affection for the
mother country--”

“Yes, that’s lugged in. But it doesn’t cover the moral aspect,” Lorne
returned. “It’s too easy and obvious, as well; it gives the enemy cause
to offend.”

“Well, there’s a tremendous moral aspect,” Finlay said, “tremendous
moral potentialities hidden in the issue. England has more to lose than
she dreams.”

“That’s just where I felt, as a practical politician, a little restless
while you were preaching,” said Lorne, laughing. “You seemed to think
the advantage of imperialism was all with England. You mustn’t press
that view on us, you know. We shall get harder to bargain with. Besides,
from the point of your sermon, it’s all the other way.”

“Oh, I don’t agree! The younger nations can work out their own salvation
unaided; but can England alone? Isn’t she too heavily weighted?”

“Oh, materially, very likely! But morally, no,” said Lorne, stoutly.
“There, if you like, she has accumulations that won’t depreciate. Money
isn’t the only capital the colonies offer investment for.”

“I’m afraid I see it in the shadow of the degeneration of age and
poverty,” said Finlay, smiling--“or age and wealth, if you prefer it.”

“And we in the disadvantage of youth and easy success,” Lorne retorted.
“We’re all very well, but we’re not the men our fathers were: we need a
lot of licking into shape. Look at that disgraceful business of ours in
the Ontario legislature the other day, and look at that fellow of
yours walking out of office at Westminster last session because of a
disastrous business connection which he was morally as clear of as
you or I! I tell you we’ve got to hang on to the things that make us
ashamed; and I guess we’ve got sense enough to know it. But this is my
corner. I am going to look in at the Milburns’, Advena. Good night, Mr
Finlay.”

Advena, walking on with Finlay, became suddenly aware that he had not
once addressed her. She had the quick impression that Lorne left him
bereft of a refuge; his plight heartened her.

“If the politicians on both sides were only as mutually appreciative,”
 she said, “the Empire would soon be knit.”

For a moment he did not answer. “I am afraid the economic situation is
not quite analogous,” he said, stiffly and absently, when the moment had
passed.

“Why does your brother always call me ‘Mr’ Finlay?” he demanded
presently. “It isn’t friendly.”

The note of irritation in his voice puzzled her. “I think the form is
commoner with us,” she said, “even among men who know each other fairly
well.” Her secret glance flashed over the gulf that nevertheless divided
Finlay and her brother, that would always divide them. She saw it with
something like pain, which struggled through her pride in both. “And
then, you know--your calling--”

“I suppose it is that,” he replied, ill content.

“I’ve noticed Dr Drummond’s way,” she told him, with rising spirits.
“It’s delightful. He drops the ‘Mr’ with fellow-ministers of his own
denomination only--never with Wesleyans or Baptists, for a moment. He
always comes back very genial from the General Assembly, and full of
stories. ‘I said to Grant,’ or ‘Macdonald said to me’--and he always
calls you ‘Finlay,’” she added shyly. “By the way, I suppose you know
he’s to be the new Moderator?”

“Is he, indeed? Yes--yes, of course, I knew! We couldn’t have a better.”

They walked on through the early autumn night. It was just not raining.
The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which
lay thick under their feet. Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut
husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along. She had picked
up half a dozen when he spoke again. “I want to tell you--I have to tell
you--something--about myself, Miss Murchison.”

“I should like,” said Advena steadily, “to hear.”

“It is a matter that has, I am ashamed to confess, curiously gone out
of my mind of late--I should say until lately. There was little until
lately--I am so poor a letter writer--to remind me of it. I am engaged
to be married!”

“But how interesting!” exclaimed Advena.

He looked at her taken aback. His own mood was heavy; it failed to
answer this lightness from her. It is hard to know what he expected,
what his unconscious blood expected for him; but it was not this. If
he had little wisdom about the hearts of women, he had less about their
behaviour. She said nothing more, but inclined her head in an angle of
deference and expectation toward what he should further communicate.

“I don’t know that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland,”
 he went on. “It has always seemed to me so remote and--disconnected with
everything here. I could not suppose it would interest anyone. I was
cared for and educated by my father’s only sister, a good woman. It was
as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed
in work. I don’t know that I can make you understand. She was identified
with all the rest--I left it to her. Shortly before I sailed for Canada
she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and--welfare, and
with--a niece of her husband’s who was staying with us at the time,
a person suitable in every way. Apart from my aunt, I do not
know--However, I owed everything to her, and I--took her advice in the
matter. I left it to her. She is a managing woman; but she can nearly
always prove herself right. Her mind ran a great deal, a little too
much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in
emigrating a man might do well to companion himself.”

“That was prudent of her,” said Advena.

He turned a look upon her. “You are not--making a mock of it?” he said.

“I am not making a mock of it.”

“My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie’s home has been broken
up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is
willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to
write.”

He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed
the turning to the Murchisons’, walking on with the single consciousness
of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that
had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not
know.

“You are to write,” she said. She sought in vain for more words; he
also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for
phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked
with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing
a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the
light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.

“It seems so extraordinarily--far away,” said Hugh Finlay, of Bross,
Dumfries, at length.

“But it will come near,” Advena replied.

“I don’t think it ever can.”

She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.

“They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and
the man whom I remember to have been me--there is a gulf fixed--”

“It is only the Atlantic,” Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in
spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt
she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile
she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to
form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.

He shook his head. “It is not marked in any geography,” he said, and
gave her a troubled smile. “How can I make it clear to you? I have come
here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before.
I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty
and charm of mere vitality--you have always been so alive. One finds a
physical freedom in which one’s very soul seems to expand; one hears the
happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing
of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to
respond--”

The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm,
healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he
recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the
general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her
life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his,
could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.

It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was
grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should
at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to
such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow
the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short
of man’s dignity, of man’s estate, for his own sake.

“It is a curious history,” she said. “You are right in thinking I should
not find it quite easy to understand. We make those--arrangements--so
much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important
than they are.”

“But they are of the highest importance.” He stopped short, confounded.

“I shall try to consecrate my marriage,” he said presently, more to
himself than to Advena.

Her thought told him bitterly: “I am afraid it is the only thing you can
do with it,” but something else came to her lips.

“I have not congratulated you. I am not sure,” she went on, with
astonishing candour, “whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all
my heart. Are you happy now?”

He turned his great dark eyes on her. “I am as happy, I dare say, as I
have any need to be.”

“But you are happier since your letter came?”

“No,” he said. The simple word fell on her heart, and she forbore.

They went on again in silence until they arrived at a place from which
they saw the gleam of the river and the line of the hills beyond. Advena
stopped.

“We came here once before together--in the spring. Do you remember?” she
asked.

“I remember very well.” She had turned, and he with her. They stood
together with darkness about them, through which they could just see
each other’s faces.

“It was spring then, and I went back alone. You are still living up that
street? Good night, then, please. I wish again--to go back--alone.”

He looked at her for an instant in dumb bewilderment, though her words
were simple enough. Then as she made a step away from him he caught her
hand.

“Advena,” he faltered, “what has happened to us? This time I cannot let
you.”



CHAPTER XIX

“Lorne,” said Dora Milburn, in her most animated manner, “who do you
think is coming to Elgin? Your London friend, Mr Hesketh! He’s going to
stay with the Emmetts, and Mrs Emmett is perfectly distracted; she says
he’s accustomed to so much, she doesn’t know how he will put up with
their plain way of living. Though what she means by that, with late
dinner and afternoon tea every day of her life, is more than I know.”

“Why, that’s splendid!” replied Lorne. “Good old Hesketh! I knew he
thought of coming across this fall, but the brute hasn’t written to
me. We’ll have to get him over to our place. When he gets tired of
the Emmetts’ plain ways he can try ours--they’re plainer. You’ll like
Hesketh; he’s a good fellow, and more go-ahead than most of them.”

“I don’t think I should ask him to stay if I were you, Lorne. Your
mother will never consent to change her hours for meals. I wouldn’t
dream of asking an Englishman to stay if I couldn’t give him late
dinner; they think so much of it. It’s the trial of Mother’s life that
Father will not submit to it. As a girl she was used to nothing else.
Afternoon tea we do have, he can’t prevent that, but Father kicks at
anything but one o’clock dinner and meat tea at six, and I suppose he
always will.”

“Doesn’t one tea spoil the other?” Lorne inquired. “I find it does
when I go to your minister’s and peck at a cress sandwich at five. You
haven’t any appetite for a reasonable meal at six. But I guess it won’t
matter to Hesketh; he’s got a lot of sense about things of that sort.
Why he served out in South Africa--volunteered. Mrs Emmett needn’t
worry. And if we find him pining for afternoon tea we can send him over
here.”

“Well, if he’s nice. But I suppose he’s pretty sure to be nice. Any
friend of the Emmetts--What is he like, Lorne?”

“Oh, he’s just a young man with a moustache! You seem to see a good many
over there. They’re all alike while they’re at school in round coats,
and after they leave school they get moustaches, and then they’re all
alike again.”

“I wish you wouldn’t tease. How tall is he? Is he fair or dark? What
colour are his eyes?”

Lorne buried his head in his hands in a pretended agony of recollection.

“So far as I remember, not exactly tall, but you wouldn’t call him
short. Complexion--well, don’t you know?--that kind of middling
complexion. Colour of his eyes--does anybody ever notice a thing like
that? You needn’t take my word for it, but I should say they were a kind
of average coloured eyes.”

“Lorne! You ARE--I suppose I’ll just have to wait till I see him. But
the girls are wild to know, and I said I’d ask you. He’ll be here in
about two weeks anyhow, and I dare say we won’t find him so much to make
a fuss about. The best sort of Englishmen don’t come over such a very
great deal, as you say. I expect they have a better time at home.”

“Hesketh’s a very good sort of Englishman,” said Lorne.

“He’s awfully well off, isn’t he?”

“According to our ideas I suppose he is,” said Lorne. “Not according to
English ideas.”

“Still less according to New York ones, then,” asserted Dora. “They
wouldn’t think much of it there even if he passed for rich in England.”
 It was a little as if she resented Lorne’s comparison of standards, and
claimed the American one as at least cis-Atlantic.

“He has a settled income,” said Lorne, “and he’s never had to work for
it, whatever luck there is in that. That’s all I know. Dora--”

“Now, Lorne, you’re not to be troublesome.”

“Your mother hasn’t come in at all this evening. Don’t you think it’s a
good sign?”

“She isn’t quite so silly as she was,” remarked Dora. “Why I should
not have the same freedom as other girls in entertaining my gentleman
friends I never could quite see.”

“I believe if we told her we had made up our minds it would be all
right,” he pleaded.

“I’m not so sure Lorne. Mother’s so deep. You can’t always tell just by
what she DOES. She thinks Stephen Stuart likes me--it’s too perfectly
idiotic; we are the merest friends--and when it’s any question of you
and Stephen--well, she doesn’t say anything, but she lets me see! She
thinks such a lot of the Stuarts because Stephen’s father was Ontario
Premier once, and got knighted.”

“I might try for that myself if you think it would please her,” said the
lover.

“Please her! And I should be Lady Murchison!” she let fall upon his
ravished ears. “Why, Lorne, she’d just worship us both! But you’ll never
do it.”

“Why not?”

Dora looked at him with pretty speculation. She had reasons for
supposing that she did admire the young man.

“You’re too nice,” she said.

“That isn’t good enough,” he responded, and drew her nearer.

“Then why did you ask me?--No, Lorne, you are not to. Suppose Father
came in?”

“I shouldn’t mind--Father’s on my side, I think.”

“Father isn’t on anybody’s side,” said his daughter, wisely.

“Dora, let me speak to him!”

Miss Milburn gave a clever imitation of a little scream of horror.

“INDEED I won’t! Lorne, you are never, NEVER to do that! As if we were
in a ridiculous English novel!”

“That’s the part of an English novel I always like,” said Lorne. “The
going and asking. It must about scare the hero out of a year’s growth;
but it’s a glorious thing to do--it would be next day, anyhow.”

“It’s just the sort of thing to please Mother,” Dora meditated, “but she
can’t be indulged all the time. No, Lorne, you’ll have to leave it to
me--when there’s anything to tell.”

“There’s everything to tell now,” said he, who had indeed nothing to
keep back.

“But you know what Mother is, Lorne. Suppose they hadn’t any objection,
she would never keep it to herself! She’d want to go announcing it all
over the place; she’d think it was the proper thing to do.”

“But, Dora, why not? If you knew how I want to announce it! I should
like to publish it in the sunrise--and the wind--so that I couldn’t go
out of doors without seeing it myself.”

“I shouldn’t mind having it in Toronto Society, when the time comes.
But not yet, Lorne--not for ages. I’m only twenty-two--nobody thinks of
settling down nowadays before she’s twenty-five at the very earliest.
I don’t know a single girl in this town that has--among my friends,
anyway. That’s three years off, and you CAN’T expect me to be engaged
for three years.”

“No.” said Lorne, “engaged six months, married the rest of the time. Or
the periods might run concurrently if you preferred--I shouldn’t mind.”

“An engaged girl has the very worst time. She gets hardly any attention,
and as to dances--well, it’s a good thing for her if the person she’s
engaged to CAN dance,” she added, teasingly.

Lorne coloured. “You said I was improving, Dora,” he said, and then
laughed at the childish claim. “But that isn’t really a thing that
counts, is it? If our lives only keep step it won’t matter much about
the ‘Washington Post.’ And so far as attention goes, you’ll get it as
long as you live, you little princess. Besides, isn’t it better to wear
the love of one man than the admiration of half a dozen?”

“And be teased and worried half out of your life by everybody you meet?
Now, Lorne, you’re getting serious and sentimental, and you know I hate
that. It isn’t any good either--Mother always used to say it made me
more stubborn to appeal to me. Horrid nature to have, isn’t it?”

Lorne’s hand went to his waistcoat pocket and came back with a tiny
packet. “It’s come, Dora--by this morning’s English mail.”

Her eyes sparkled, and then rested with guarded excitement upon the
little case. “Oh, Lorne!”

She said nothing more, but watched intently while he found the spring,
and disclosed the ring within. Then she drew a long breath. “Lorne
Murchison, what a lovely one!”

“Doesn’t it look,” said he, “just a little serious and sentimental?”

“But SUCH good style, too,” he declared, bending over it. “And quite
new--I haven’t seen anything a bit like it. I do love a design when it’s
graceful. Solitaires are so old-fashioned.”

He kept his eyes upon her face, feeding upon the delight in it.
Exultation rose up in him: he knew the primitive guile of man,
indifferent to such things, alluring with them the other creature. He
did not stop to condone her weakness; rather he seized it in ecstasy;
it was all part of the glad scheme to help the lover. He turned the
diamonds so that they flashed and flashed again before her. Then,
trusting his happy instinct, he sought for her hand. But she held that
back. “I want to SEE it,” she declared, and he was obliged to let her
take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every
light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little
tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat
elated and adoring, the simple fellow.

Reluctantly at last she gave up her hand. “But it’s only trying on--not
putting on,” she told him. He said nothing till it flashed upon her
finger, and in her eyes he saw a spark from below of that instinctive
cupidity toward jewels that man can never recognize as it deserves in
woman, because of his desire to gratify it.

“You’ll wear it, Dora?” he pleaded.

“Lorne, you are the dearest fellow! But how could I? Everybody would
guess!”

Her gaze, nevertheless, rested fascinated on the ring, which she posed
as it pleased her.

“Let them guess! I’d rather they knew, but--it does look well on your
finger, dear.”

She held it up once more to the light, then slipped it decisively off
and gave it back to him. “I can’t, you know, Lorne. I didn’t really say
you might get it; and now you’ll have to keep it till--till the time
comes. But this much I will say--it’s the sweetest thing, and you’ve
shown the loveliest taste, and if it weren’t such a dreadful give-away
I’d like to wear it awfully.”

They discussed it with argument, with endearment, with humour, and
reproach, but her inflexible basis soon showed through their talk: she
would not wear the ring. So far he prevailed, that it was she, not
he, who kept it. Her insistence that he should take it back brought
something like anger out of him; and in the surprise of this she yielded
so much. She did it unwillingly at the time, but afterward, when she
tried on the thing again in the privacy of her own room; she was rather
satisfied to have it, safe under lock and key, a flashing, smiling
mystery to visit when she liked and reveal when she would.

“Lorne could never get me such a beauty again if he lost it,” she
advised herself, “and he’s awfully careless. And I’m not sure that I
won’t tell Eva Delarue, just to show it to her. She’s as close as wax.”

One feels a certain sorrow for the lover on his homeward way, squaring
his shoulders against the foolish perversity of the feminine mind,
resolutely guarding his heart from any hint of real reprobation. Through
the sweetness of her lips and the affection of her pretty eyes, through
all his half-possession of all her charms and graces, must have come
dully the sense of his great occasion manque, that dear day of love when
it leaves the mark of its claim. And in one’s regret there is perhaps
some alloy of pity, that less respectful thing. We know him elsewhere
capable of essaying heights, yet we seem to look down upon the drama of
his heart. It may be well to remember that the level is not everything
in love. He who carefully adjusts an intellectual machine may descry a
higher mark; he can construct nothing in a mistress; he is, therefore,
able to see the facts and to discriminate the desirable. But Lorne loved
with all his imagination. This way dares the imitation of the gods by
which it improves the quality of the passion, so that such a love stands
by itself to be considered, apart from the object, one may say. A strong
and beautiful wave lifted Lorne Murchison along to his destiny, since it
was the pulse of his own life, though Dora Milburn played moon to it.



CHAPTER XX

Alfred Hesketh had, after all, written to young Murchison about his
immediate intention of sailing for Canada and visiting Elgin; the letter
arrived a day or two later. It was brief and businesslike, but it gave
Lorne to understand that since his departure the imperial idea had been
steadily fermenting, not only in the national mind, but particularly in
Hesketh’s; that it produced in his case a condition only to be properly
treated by personal experience. Hesketh was coming over to prove
whatever advantage there was in seeing for yourself. That he was coming
with the right bias Lorne might infer, he said, from the fact that he
had waited a fortnight to get his passage by the only big line to
New York that stood out for our mercantile supremacy against American
combination.

“He needn’t bother to bring any bias,” Lorne remarked when he had read
this, “but he’ll have to pay a lot of extra luggage on the one he takes
back with him.”

He felt a little irritation at being offered the testimony of the Cunard
ticket. Back on his native soil, its independence ran again like sap
in him: nobody wanted a present of good will; the matter stood on its
merits.

He was glad, nevertheless, that Hesketh was coming, gratified that it
would now be his turn to show prospects, and turn figures into facts,
and make plain the imperial profit from the further side. Hesketh was
such an intelligent fellow, there would be the keenest sort of pleasure
in demonstrating things, big things, to him, little things, too, ways
of living, differences of habit. Already in the happy exercise of his
hospitable instinct he saw how Hesketh would get on with his mother,
with Stella, with Dr Drummond. He saw Hesketh interested, domiciled,
remaining--the ranch life this side of the Rockies, Lorne thought, would
tempt him, or something new and sound in Winnipeg. He kept his eye
open for chances, and noted one or two likely things. “We want labour
mostly,” he said to Advena, “but nobody is refused leave to land because
he has a little money.”

“I should think not, indeed,” remarked Mrs Murchison, who was present.
“I often wish your father and I had had a little more when we began.
That whole Gregory block was going for three thousand dollars then. I
wonder what it’s worth now?”

“Yes, but you and Father are worth more, too,” remarked Stella acutely.

“In fact, all the elder members of the family have approximated in
value, Stella,” said her brother, “and you may too, in time.”

“I’ll take my chance with the country,” she retorted. They were all
permeated with the question of the day; even Stella, after holding
haughtily aloof for some time, had been obliged to get into step, as
she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England,
here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops
and the offices, up and down the tree-bordered streets as men went
to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of
the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about.
Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating
Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong
friendships, male and female in every form of “the Collegiate,” had been
put to this touchstone, sometimes with shattering effect. If you would
not serve with Wallingham the greatness of Britain you were held to
favour going over to the United States; there was no middle course.
It became a personal matter in the ward schools and small boys pursued
small boys with hateful cries of “Annexationist!” The subject even
trickled about the apple-barrels and potato-bags of the market square.
Here it should have raged, pregnant as it was with bucolic blessing; but
our agricultural friends expect nothing readily except adverse weather,
least of all a measure of economic benefit to themselves. Those of Fox
County thought it looked very well, but it was pretty sure to work out
some other way. Elmore Crow failed heavily to catch a light even from
Lorne Murchison.

“You keep your hair on, Lorne,” he advised. “We ain’t going to get such
big changes yet. An’ if we do the blooming syndicates ‘ll spoil ‘em for
us.”

There were even dissentients among the farmers. The voice of one was
raised who had lived laborious years, and many of them in the hope of
seeing his butter and cheese go unimpeded across the American line. It
must be said, however, that still less attention was paid to him, and it
was generally conceded that he would die without the sight.

It was the great topic. The day Wallingham went his defiant furthest
in the House and every colonial newspaper set it up in acclaiming
headlines, Horace Williams, enterprising fellow, remembered that Lorne
had seen the great man under circumstances that would probably pan out,
and send round Rawlins. Rawlins was to get something that would do to
call “Wallingham in the Bosom of his Family,” and as much as Lorne
cared to pour into him about his own view of the probable issue. Rawlins
failed to get the interview, came back to say that Lorne didn’t seem
to think himself a big enough boy for that, but he did not return
empty-handed. Mr Murchison sent Mr Williams the promise of some
contributions upon the question of the hour, which he had no objection
to sign and which Horace should have for the good of the cause. Horace
duly had them, the Express duly published them, and they were copied in
full by the Dominion and several other leading journals, with an amount
of comment which everyone but Mrs Murchison thought remarkable.

“I don’t pretend to understand it,” she said, “but anybody can see
that he knows what he’s talking about.” John Murchison read them with a
critical eye and a pursed-out lip.

“He takes too much for granted.”

“What does he take for granted?” asked Mrs Murchison.

“Other folks being like himself,” said the father.

That, no doubt, was succinct and true; nevertheless, the articles
had competence as well as confidence. The writer treated facts with
restraint and conditions with sympathy. He summoned ideas from the
obscurity of men’s minds, and marshalled them in the light, so that many
recognized what they had been trying to think. He wrote with homeliness
as well as force, wishing much more to make the issue recognizable than
to create fine phrases, with the result that one or two of his sentences
passed into the language of the discussion which, as any of its
standard-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric. The
articles were competent: if you listened to Horace Williams you would
have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of
economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr
Williams. It was their enthusiasm, however, that gave them the wing on
which they travelled. People naturally took different views, even of
this quality. “Young Murchison’s working the imperial idea for all it’s
worth,” was Walter Winter’s; and Octavius Milburn humorously summed up
the series as “tall talk.”

Alfred Hesketh came, it was felt, rather opportunely into the midst of
this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a
good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival;
but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the
interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts’
pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger.
The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the
mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain. Hesketh
was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled
cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal. They did not
perhaps say it, but it was in their minds. “There’s one of them,” was
what they thought when they met him in the street. At any other time he
would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very
romance of destiny. The perception was obscure, but it was there.
Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed,
well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps,
who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and
was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or
theirs to him.

He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the
following day. They greeted heartily. “Now this IS good!” said Lorne,
and he thought so. Hesketh confided his first impression. “It’s not
unlike an English country town,” he said, “only the streets are wider,
and the people don’t look so much in earnest.”

“Oh, they’re just as much in earnest some of the time,” Lorne laughed,
“but maybe not all the time!”

The sun shone crisply round them; there was a brisk October market; on
the other side of the road Elmore Crow dangled his long legs over a cart
flap and chewed a cheroot. Elgin was abroad, doing business on its wide
margin of opportunity. Lorne cast a backward glance at conditions he had
seen.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “Sharp of you to spot it so soon, old
chap! You’re staying with the English Church minister, aren’t you--Mr
Emmett? Some connection of yours, aren’t they?”

“Mrs Emmett is Chafe’s sister--Mrs Chafe, you know, is my aunt,” Hesketh
reminded him. “I say, Murchison, I left old Chafe wilder than ever.
Wallingham’s committee keep sending him leaflets and things. They take
it for granted he’s on the right side, since his interests are. The
other day they asked him for a subscription! The old boy sent his reply
to the Daily News and carried it about for a week. I think that gave him
real satisfaction; but he hates the things by post.”

Lorne laughed delightedly. “I expect he’s snowed under with them. I sent
him my own valuable views last week.”

“I’m afraid they’ll only stiffen him. That got to be his great argument
after you left, the fact that you fellows over here want it. He doesn’t
approve of a bargain if the other side sees a profit. Curiously enough,
his foremen and people out in Chiswick are all for it. I was talking to
one of them just before I left--‘Stands to reason, sir,’ he said, ‘we
don’t want to pay more for a loaf than we do now. But we’ll do it, sir,
if it means downing them Germans; he said.”

Lorne’s eyebrows half-perceptibly twitched. “They do ‘sir’ you a lot
over there, don’t they?” he said. “It was as much as I could do to get
at what a fellow of that sort meant, tumbling over the ‘sirs’ he propped
it up with. Well, all kinds of people, all kinds of argument, I suppose,
when it comes to trying to get ‘em solid! But I was going to say we are
all hoping you’ll give us a part of your time while you’re in Elgin.
My family are looking forward to meeting you. Come along and let me
introduce you to my father now--he’s only round the corner.”

“By all means!” said Hesketh, and they fell into step together. As Lorne
said, it was only a short distance, but far enough to communicate a
briskness, an alertness, from the step of one young man to that of the
other. “I wish it were five miles,” Hesketh said, all his stall-fed
muscles responding to the new call of his heart and lungs. “Any good
walks about here? I asked Emmett, but he didn’t know--supposed you could
walk to Clayfield if you didn’t take the car. He seems to have lost his
legs. I suppose parsons do.”

“Not all of them,” said Lorne. “There’s a fellow that has a church over
in East Elgin, Finlay his name is, that beats the record of anything
around here. He just about ranges the county in the course of a week.”

“The place is too big for one parish, no doubt,” Hesketh remarked.

“Oh, he’s a Presbyterian! The Episcopalians haven’t got any hold to
speak of over there. Here we are,” said Lorne, and turned in at the
door. The old wooden sign was long gone. “John Murchison and Sons”
 glittered instead in the plate-glass windows, but Hesketh did not see
it.

“Why do you think he’ll be in here?” he asked, on young Murchison’s
heels.

“Because he always is when he isn’t over at the shop,” replied Lorne.
“It’s his place of business--his store, you know. There he is! Hard
luck--he’s got a customer. We’ll have to wait.”

He went on ahead with his impetuous step; he did not perceive the
instant’s paralysis that seemed to overtake Hesketh’s, whose foot
dragged, however, no longer than that. It was an initiation; he had
been told he might expect some. He checked his impulse to be amused, and
guarded his look round, not to show unseemly curiosity. His face,
when he was introduced to Alec, who was sorting some odd dozens of
tablespoons, was neutral and pleasant. He reflected afterward that he
had been quite equal to the occasion. He thought, too, that he had shown
some adaptability. Alec was not a person of fluent discourse, and when
he had inquired whether Hesketh was going to make a long stay, the
conversation might have languished but for this.

“Is that Birmingham?” he asked, nodding kindly at the spoons.

“Came to us through a house in Liverpool,” Alec responded. “I expect you
had a stormy crossing, Mr Hesketh.”

“It was a bit choppy. We had the fiddles on most of the time,” Hesketh
replied. “Most of the time. Now, how do you find the bicycle trade over
here? Languishing, as it is with us?”

“Oh, it keeps up pretty well,” said Alec, “but we sell more spoons. ‘N’
what do you think of this country, far as you’ve seen it?”

“Oh, come now, it’s a little soon to ask, isn’t it? Yes--I suppose
bicycles go out of fashion, and spoons never do. I was thinking,” added
Hesketh, casting his eyes over a serried rank, “of buying a bicycle.”

Alec had turned to put the spoons in their place on the shelves. “Better
take your friend across to Cox’s,” he advised Lorne over his shoulder.
“He’ll be able to get a motorbike there,” a suggestion which gave Mr
Hesketh to reflect later that if that was the general idea of doing
business it must be an easy country to make money in.

The customer was satisfied at last, and Mr Murchison walked sociably to
the door with him; it was the secretary of the local Oddfellows’ Lodge,
who had come in about a furnace.

“Now’s our chance,” said Lorne. “Father, this is Mr Hesketh, from
London--my father, Hesketh. He can tell you all you want to know about
Canada--this part of it, anyway. Over thirty years, isn’t it, Father,
since you came out?”

“Glad to meet you,” said John Murchison, “glad to meet you, Mr Hesketh.
We’ve heard much about you.”

“You must have been quite among the pioneers of Elgin, Mr Murchison,”
 said Hesketh as they shook hands. Alec hadn’t seemed to think of that;
Hesketh put it down to the counter.

“Not quite,” said John. “We’ll say among the early arrivals.”

“Have you ever been back in your native Scotland?” asked Hesketh.

“Aye, twice.”

“But you prefer the land of your adoption?”

“I do. But I think by now it’ll be kin,” said Mr Murchison. “It was good
to see the heather again, but a man lives best where he’s taken root.”

“Yes, yes. You seem to do a large business here, Mr Murchison.”

“Pretty well for the size of the place. You must get Lorne to take you
over Elgin. It’s a fair sample of our rising manufacturing towns.”

“I hope he will. I understand you manufacture to some extent yourself?”

“We make our own stoves and a few odd things.”

“You don’t send any across the Atlantic yet?” queried Hesketh jocularly.

“Not yet. No, sir!”

Then did Mr Hesketh show himself in true sympathy with the novel and
independent conditions of the commonwealth he found himself in.

“I beg you won’t use that form with me,” he said, “I know it isn’t the
custom of the country, and I am a friend of your son’s, you see.”

The iron merchant looked at him, just an instant’s regard, in which
astonishment struggled with the usual deliberation. Then his considering
hand went to his chin.

“I see. I must remember,” he said.

The son, Lorne, glanced in the pause beyond John Murchison’s broad
shoulders, through the store door and out into the moderate commerce of
Main Street, which had carried the significance and the success of his
father’s life. His eye came back and moved over the contents of the
place, taking stock of it, one might say, and adjusting the balance with
pride. He had said very little since they had been in the store. Now he
turned to Hesketh quietly.

“I wouldn’t bother about that if I were you,” he said. “My father spoke
quite--colloquially.”

“Oh!” said Hesketh.

They parted on the pavement outside. “I hope you understand,” said
Lorne, with an effort at heartiness, “how glad my parents will be to
have you if you find yourself able to spare us any of your time?”

“Thanks very much,” said Hesketh; “I shall certainly give myself the
pleasure of calling as soon as possible.”



CHAPTER XXI

“Dear me!” said Dr Drummond. “Dear me! Well! And what does Advena
Murchison say to all this?”

He and Hugh Finlay were sitting in the Doctor’s study, the pleasantest
room in the house. It was lined with standard religious philosophy,
standard poets, standard fiction, all that was standard, and nothing
that was not; and the shelves included several volumes of the Doctor’s
own sermons, published in black morocco through a local firm that did
business by the subscription method, with “Drummond” in gold letters
on the back. There were more copies of these, perhaps, than it would be
quite thoughtful to count, though a good many were annually disposed of
at the church bazaar, where the Doctor presented them with a generous
hand. A sumptuous desk, and luxurious leather-covered armchairs
furnished the room; a beautiful little Parian copy of a famous Cupid and
Psyche decorated the mantelpiece, and betrayed the touch of pagan in
the Presbyterian. A bright fire burned in the grate, and there was not a
speck of dust anywhere.

Dr Drummond, lost in his chair, with one knee dropped on the other,
joined his fingers at the tips, and drew his forehead into a web of
wrinkles. Over it his militant grey crest curled up; under it his eyes
darted two shrewd points of interrogation.

“What does Miss Murchison say to it?” he repeated with craft and
courage, as Finlay’s eyes dropped and his face slowly flushed under
the question. It was in this room that Dr Drummond examined “intending
communicants” and cases likely to come before the Session; he never
shirked a leading question. “Miss Murchison,” said Finlay, after a
moment, “was good enough to say that she thought her father’s house
would be open to Miss--to my friends when they arrived; but I thought it
would be more suitable to ask your hospitality, sir.”

“Did she so?” asked Dr Drummond gravely. It was more a comment than an
inquiry. “Did she so?” Infinite kindness was in it.

The young man assented with an awkward gesture, half-bend, half-nod, and
neither for a moment spoke again. It was one of those silences with a
character, conscious, tentative. Half-veiled, disavowed thoughts rose up
in it, awakened by Advena’s name, turning away their heads. The ticking
of the Doctor’s old-fashioned watch came through it from his waistcoat
pocket. It was he who spoke first.

“I christened Advena Murchison,” he said. “Her father was one of those
who called me, as a young man, to this ministry. The names of both her
parents are on my first communion roll. Aye!”...

The fire snapped and the watch went on ticking.

“So Advena thought well of it all. Did she so?”

The young man raised his heavy eyes and looked unflinchingly at Dr
Drummond.

“Miss Murchison,” he said, “is the only other person to whom I have
confided the matter. I have written, fixing that date, with her
approval--at her desire. Not immediately. I took time to--think it over.
Then it seemed better to arrange for the ladies reception first, so
before posting I have come to you.”

“Then the letter has not gone?”

“It is in my pocket.”

“Finlay, you will have a cigar? I don’t smoke myself; my throat won’t
stand it; but I understand these are passable. Grant left them here.
He’s a chimney, that man Grant. At it day and night.”

This was a sacrifice. Dr Drummond hated tobacco, the smell of it, the
ash of it, the time consumed in it. There was no need at all to offer
Finlay one of the Reverend Grant’s cigars. Propitiation must indeed be
desired when the incense is abhorred. But Finlay declined to smoke.
The Doctor, with his hands buried deep in his trousers pockets, where
something metallic clinked in them, began to pace and turn. His mouth
had the set it wore when he handled a difficult motion in the General
Assembly.

“I’m surprised to hear that, Finlay; though it may be well not to be
surprised at what a woman will say--or won’t say.”

“Surprised?” said the younger man confusedly. “Why should anyone be
surprised?”

“I know her well. I’ve watched her grow up. I remember her mother’s
trouble because she would scratch the paint on the pew in front of her
with the nails in her little boots. John Murchison sang in the choir in
those days. He had a fine bass voice; he has it still. And Mrs Murchison
had to keep the family in order by herself. It was sometimes as much as
she could do, poor woman. They sat near the front, and many a good
hard look I used to give them while I was preaching. Knox Church was a
different place then. The choir sat in the back gallery, and we had a
precentor, a fine fellow--he lost an arm at Ridgway in the Fenian raid.
Well I mind him and the frown he would put on when he took up the fork.
But, for that matter, every man Jack in the choir had a frown on in the
singing, though the bass fellows would be the fiercest. We’ve been twice
enlarged since, and the organist has long been a salaried professional.
But I doubt whether the praise of God is any heartier than it was when
it followed Peter Craig’s tuning-fork. Aye. You’d always hear John
Murchison’s note in the finish.”

Finlay was listening with the look of a charmed animal. Dr Drummond’s
voice was never more vibrant, more moving, more compelling than when he
called up the past; and here to Finlay the past was itself enchanted.

“She always had those wonderful dark eyes. She’s pale enough now, but
as a child she was rosy. Taking her place of a winter evening, with the
snow on her fur cap and her hair, I often thought her a picture. I liked
to have her attention while I was preaching, even as a child; and when
she was absent I missed her. It was through my ministrations that she
saw her way to professing the Church of Christ, and under my heartfelt
benediction that she first broke bread in her Father’s house. I hold the
girl in great affection, Finlay; and I grieve to hear this.”

The other drew a long breath, and his hand tightened on the arm of his
chair. He was, as we know, blind to many of the world’s aspects, even to
those in which he himself figured; and Dr Drummond’s plain hypothesis of
his relations with Advena came before him in forced illumination, flash
by tragic flash. This kind of revelation is more discomforting than
darkness, since it carries the surprise of assault, and Finlay groped in
it, helpless and silent.

“You are grieved, sir?” he said mechanically.

“Man, she loves you!” exclaimed the Doctor, in a tone that would no
longer forbear.

Hugh Finlay seemed to take the words just where they were levelled, in
his breast. He half leaped from his chair; the lower part of his face
had the rigidity of iron.

“I am not obliged to discuss such a matter as that,” he said hoarsely,
“with you or with any man.”

He looked confusedly about him for his hat, which he had left in the
hall; and Dr Drummond profited by the instant. He stepped across and
laid a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. Had they both been standing
the gesture would have been impossible to Dr Drummond with dignity;
as it was, it had not only that, but benignance, a kind of tender good
will, rare in expression with the minister, rare, for that matter, in
feeling with him too, though the chord was always there to be sounded.

“Finlay,” he said; “Finlay!”

Between two such temperaments the touch and the tone together made an
extraordinary demonstration. Finlay, with an obvious effort, let it lie
upon him. The tension of his body relaxed, that of his soul he covered,
leaning forward and burying his head in his hands.

“Will you say I have no claim to speak?” asked Dr Drummond, and met
silence. “It is upon my lips to beg you not to send that letter,
Finlay.” He took his hand from the young man’s shoulder, inserted a
thumb in each of his waistcoat pockets, and resumed his walk.

“On my own account I must send it,” said Finlay. “On Miss
Murchison’s--she bids me to. We have gone into the matter together.”

“I can imagine what you made of it together. There’s a good deal of her
father in Advena. He would be the last man to say a word for himself.
You told her this tale you have told me, and she told you to get Miss
Christie out and marry her without delay, eh? And what would you expect
her to tell you--a girl of that spirit?”

“I cannot see why pride should influence her.”

“Then you know little about women. It was pride, pure and simple,
Finlay, that made her tell you that--and she’ll be a sorry woman if you
act on it.”

“No,” said Finlay, suddenly looking up, “I may know little about women,
but I know more about Advena Murchison than that. She advised me in the
sense she thought right and honourable, and her advice was sincere. And,
Dr Drummond, deeply as I feel the bearing of Miss Murchison’s view of
the matter, I could not, in any case, allow my decision to rest upon it.
It must stand by itself.”

“You mean that your decision to marry to oblige your aunt should not be
influenced by the fact that it means the wrecking of your own happiness
and that of another person. I can’t agree, Finlay. I spoke first of
Advena Murchison because her part and lot in it are most upon my heart.
I feel, too, that someone should put her case. Her own father would
never open his lips. If you’re to be hauled over the coals about this
I’m the only man to do it. And I’m going to.”

A look of sharp determination came into the minister’s eyes; he had the
momentary air of a small Scotch terrier with a bidding. Finlay looked at
him in startled recognition of another possible phase of his dilemma; he
thought he knew it in every wretched aspect. It was a bold reference
of Dr Drummond’s; it threw down the last possibility of withdrawal for
Finlay; they must have it out now, man to man, with a little, perhaps,
even in that unlikely place, of penitent to confessor. It was an
exigency, it helped Finlay to pull himself together, and there was
something in his voice, when he spoke, like the vibration of relief.

“I am pained and distressed more than I have any way of telling you,
sir,” he said, “that--the state of feeling--between Miss Murchison and
myself should have been so plain to you. It is incomprehensible to
me that it should be so, since it is only very lately that I have
understood it truly myself. I hope you will believe that it was the
strangest, most unexpected, most sudden revelation.”

He paused and looked timidly at the Doctor; he, the great fellow, in
straining bondage to his heart, leaning forward with embarrassed tension
in every muscle, Dr Drummond alert, poised, critical, balancing his
little figure on the hearthrug.

“I preach faith in miracles,” he said. “I dare say between you and her
it would be just that.”

“I have been deeply culpable. Common sense, common knowledge of men and
women should have warned me that there might be danger. But I looked
upon the matter as our own--as between us only. I confess that I have
not till now thought of that part of it, but surely--You cannot mean
to tell me that what I have always supposed my sincere and devoted
friendship for Miss Murchison has been in any way prejudicial--”

“To her in the ordinary sense? To her prospects of marriage and her
standing in the eyes of the community? No, Finlay. No. I have not heard
the matter much referred to. You seem to have taken none of the ordinary
means--you have not distinguished her in the eyes of gossip. If you had
it would be by no means the gravest thing to consider. Such tokens are
quickly forgotten, especially here, where attentions of the kind often,
I’ve noticed, lead to nothing. It is the fact, and not the appearance of
it, that I speak of--that I am concerned with.”

“The fact is beyond mending,” said Finlay, dully.

“Aye, the fact is beyond mending. It is beyond mending that Advena
Murchison belongs to you and you to her in no common sense. It’s beyond
mending that you cannot now be separated without such injury to you both
as I would not like to look upon. It’s beyond mending, Finlay, because
it is one of those things that God has made. But it is not beyond
marring, and I charge you to look well what you are about in connection
with it.”

A flash of happiness, of simple delight, lit the young man’s sombre eyes
as the phrases fell. To the minister they were mere forcible words;
to Finlay they were soft rain in a famished land. Then he looked again
heavily at the pattern of the carpet.

“Would you have me marry Advena Murchison?” he said, with a kind of
shamed yielding to the words.

“I would--and no other. Man, I saw it from the beginning!” exclaimed the
Doctor. “I don’t say it isn’t an awkward business. But at least there’ll
be no heartbreak in Scotland. I gather you never said a word to the
Bross lady on the subject, and very few on any other. You tell me you
left it all with that good woman, your aunt, to arrange after you left.
Do you think a creature of any sentiment would have accepted you on
those terms? Not she. So far as I can make out, Miss Cameron is just a
sensible, wise woman that would be the first to see the folly in this
business if she knew the rights of it. Come, Finlay, you’re not such a
great man with the ladies--you can’t pretend she has any affection for
you.”

The note of raillery in the Doctor’s voice drew Finlay’s brows together.

“I don’t know,” he said, “whether I have to think of her affections, but
I do know I have to think of her dignity, her confidence, and her belief
in the honourable dealing of a man whom she met under the sanction of a
trusted roof. The matter may look light here; it is serious there. She
has her circle of friends; they are acquainted with her engagement. She
has made all her arrangements to carry it out; she has disposed of her
life. I cannot ask her to reconsider her lot because I have found a
happier adjustment for mine.”

“Finlay,” said Dr Drummond, “you will not be known in Bross or anywhere
else as a man who has jilted a woman. Is that it?”

“I will not be a man who has jilted a woman.”

“There is no sophist like pride. Look at the case on its merits. On the
one side a disappointment for Miss Cameron. I don’t doubt she’s counting
on coming, but at worst a worldly disappointment. And the very grievous
humiliation for you of writing to tell her that you have made a mistake.
You deserve that, Finlay. If you wouldn’t be a man who has jilted a
woman you have no business to lend yourself to such matters with the
capacity of a blind kitten. That is the damage on the one side. On the
other--”

“I know all that there is to be said,” interrupted Finlay, “on the
other.”

“Then face it, man. Go home and write the whole truth to Bross. I’ll do
it for you--no, I won’t, either. Stand up to it yourself. You must hurt
one of two women; choose the one that will suffer only in her vanity. I
tell you that Scotch entanglement of yours is pure cardboard farce--it
won’t stand examination. It’s appalling to think that out of an
extravagant, hypersensitive conception of honour, egged on by that poor
girl, you could be capable of turning it into the reality of your life.”

“I’ve taken all these points of view, sir, and I can’t throw the woman
over. The objection to it isn’t in reason--it’s somehow in the past and
the blood. It would mean the sacrifice of all that I hold most valuable
in myself. I should expect myself after that to stick at nothing--why
should I?”

“There is one point of view that perhaps you have not taken,” said Dr
Drummond, in his gravest manner. “You are settled here in your charge.
In all human probability you will remain here in East Elgin, as I have
remained here, building and fortifying the place you have won for the
Lord in the hearts of the people. Advena Murchison’s life will also go
on here--there is nothing to take it away. You have both strong natures.
Are you prepared for that?”

“We are both prepared for it. We shall both be equal to it. I count upon
her, and she counts upon me, to furnish in our friendship the greater
part of whatever happiness life may have in store for us.”

“Then you must be a pair of born lunatics!” said Dr Drummond, his jaw
grim, his eyes snapping. “What you propose is little less than a crime,
Finlay. It can come to nothing but grief, if no worse. And your wife,
poor woman, whatever she deserves, it is better than that! My word, if
she could choose her prospect, think you she would hesitate? Finlay, I
entreat you as a matter of ordinary prudence, go home and break it
off. Leave Advena out of it--you have no business to make this marriage
whether or no. Leave other considerations to God and to the future. I
beseech you, bring it to an end!”

Finlay got up and held out his hand. “I tell you from my heart it is
impossible,” he said.

“I can’t move you?” said Dr Drummond. “Then let us see if the Lord can.
You will not object, Finlay, to bring the matter before Him, here and
now, in a few words of prayer? I should find it hard to let you go
without them.”

They went down upon their knees where they stood; and Dr Drummond did
little less than order Divine interference; but the prayer that was
inaudible was to the opposite purpose.

Ten minutes later the minister himself opened the door to let Finlay out
into the night. “You will remember,” he said as they shook hands,
“that what I think of your position in this matter makes no difference
whatever to the question of your aunt’s coming here with Miss Cameron
when they arrive. You will bring them to this house as a matter of
course. I wish you could be guided to a different conclusion but, after
all, it is your own conscience that must be satisfied. They will be
better here than at the Murchisons’,” he added with a last shaft of
reproach, “and they will be very welcome.”

It said much for Dr Drummond that Finlay was able to fall in with the
arrangement. He went back to his boarding-house, and added a postscript
embodying it to his letter to Bross. Then he walked out upon the
midnight two feverish miles to the town, and posted the letter. The way
back was longer and colder.



CHAPTER XXII

“Well, Winter,” said Octavius Milburn, “I expect there’s business in
this for you.”

Mr Milburn and Mr Winter had met in the act of unlocking their boxes at
the post-office. Elgin had enjoyed postal delivery for several years,
but not so much as to induce men of business to abandon the post-office
box that had been the great convenience succeeding window inquiry.
In time the boxes would go, but the habit of dropping in for your own
noonday mail on the way home to dinner was deep-rooted, and undoubtedly
you got it earlier. Moreover, it takes time to engender confidence in
a postman when he is drawn from your midst, and when you know perfectly
well that he would otherwise be driving the mere watering-cart, or
delivering the mere ice, as he was last year.

“Looks like it,” responded Mr Winter, cheerfully. “The boys have been
round as usual. I told them they’d better try another shop this time,
but they seemed to think the old reliable was good enough to go on
with.”

This exchange, to anyone in Elgin, would have been patently simple. On
that day there was only one serious topic in Elgin, and there could have
been only one reference to business for Walter Winter. The Dominion had
come up the day before with the announcement that Mr Robert Farquharson
who, for an aggregate of eleven years, had represented the Liberals of
South Fox in the Canadian House of Commons, had been compelled under
medical advice to withdraw from public life. The news was unexpected,
and there was rather a feeling among Mr Farquharson’s local support in
Elgin that it shouldn’t have come from Toronto. It will be gathered
that Horace Williams, as he himself acknowledged, was wild. The general
feeling, and to some extent Mr Williams’s, was appeased by the further
information that Mr Farquharson had been obliged to go to Toronto to
see a specialist, whose report he had naturally enough taken to party
headquarters, whence the Dominion would get it, as Mr Williams said, by
telephone or any quicker way there was. Williams, it should be added,
was well ahead with the details, as considerate as was consistent with
public enterprise, of the retiring member’s malady, its duration,
the date of the earliest symptoms, and the growth of anxiety in Mrs
Farquharson, who had finally insisted--and how right she was!--on the
visit to the specialist, upon which she had accompanied Mr Farquharson.
He sent round Rawlins. So that Elgin was in possession of all the facts,
and Walter Winter, who had every pretension to contest the seat again
and every satisfaction that it wouldn’t be against Farquharson,
might naturally be expected to be taken up with them sufficiently to
understand a man who slapped him on the shoulder in the post-office with
the remark I have quoted.

“I guess they know what they’re about,” returned Mr Milburn. “It’s a bad
knock for the Grits, old Farquharson having to drop out. He’s getting up
in years, but he’s got a great hold here. He’ll be a dead loss in votes
to his party. I always said our side wouldn’t have a chance till the old
man was out of the way.”

Mr Winter twisted the watch-chain across his protuberant waistcoat, and
his chin sank in reflective folds above his neck-tie. Above that again
his nose drooped over his moustache, and his eyelids over his eyes,
which sought the floor. Altogether he looked sunk, like an overfed bird,
in deferential contemplation of what Mr Milburn was saying.

“They’ve nobody to touch him, certainly in either ability or
experience,” he replied, looking up to do it, with a handsome air of
concession. “Now that Martin’s dead, and Jim Fawkes come that howler
over Pink River, they’ll have their work cut out for them to find a man.
I hear Fawkes takes it hard, after all he’s done for ‘em, not to get the
nomination, but they won’t hear of it. Quite right, too; he’s let too
many people in over that concession of his to be popular, even among his
friends.”

“I suppose he has. Dropped anything there yourself?--No? Nor I. When a
thing gets to the boom stage I say let it alone, even if there’s gold in
it and you’ve got a School of Mines man to tell you so. Fawkes came out
of it at the small end himself, I expect, but that doesn’t help him any
in the eyes of businessmen.”

“I hear,” said Walter Winter, stroking his nose, “that old man Parsons
has come right over since the bosses at Ottawa have put so much money
on preference trade with the old country. He says he was a Liberal once,
and may be a Liberal again, but he doesn’t see his way to voting to give
his customers blankets cheaper than he can make them, and he’ll wait
till the clouds roll by.”

“He won’t be the only one, either,” said Milburn. “Take my word for
it, they’ll be dead sick and sorry over this imperial craze in a year’s
time, every Government that’s taken it up. The people won’t have it. The
Empire looks nice on the map, but when it comes to practical politics
their bread and butter’s in the home industries. There’s a great
principle at stake, Winter; I must say I envy you standing up for it
under such favourable conditions. Liberals like Young and Windle may
talk big, but when it comes to the ballot-box you’ll have the whole
manufacturing interest of the place behind you, and nobody the wiser.
It’s a great thing to carry the standard on an issue above and beyond
party politics--it’s a purer air, my boy.”

Walter Winter’s nod confirmed the sagacity of this, and appreciated the
highmindedness. It was a parting nod; Mr Winter had too much on hand
that morning to waste time upon Octavius Milburn; but it was full of the
qualities that ensure the success of a man’s relation with his fellows.
Consideration was in it, and understanding, and that kind of geniality
that offers itself on a plain business footing, a commercial heartiness
that has no nonsense about it. He had half a dozen casual chats like
this with Mr Milburn on his way up Main Street, and his manner expanded
in cordiality and respect with each, as if his growing confidence in
himself increased his confidence in his fellow-men. The same assurance
greeted him several times over. Every friend wanted to remind him of
the enemy’s exigency, and to assure him that the enemy’s new policy was
enough by itself to bring him romping in at last; and to every assurance
he presented the same acceptable attitude of desiring for particular
reasons to take special note of such valuable views. At the end he
had neither elicited nor imparted a single opinion of any importance;
nevertheless, he was quite entitled to his glow of satisfaction.

Among Mr Winter’s qualifications for political life was his capacity
to arrive at an estimate of the position of the enemy. He was never
persuaded to his own advantage; he never stepped ahead of the facts.
It was one of the things that made him popular with the other side,
his readiness to do justice to their equipment, to acknowledge their
chances. There is gratification of a special sort in hearing your points
of vantage confessed by the foe; the vanity is soothed by his open
admission that you are worthy of his steel. It makes you a little less
keen somehow, about defeating him. It may be that Mr Winter had an
instinct for this, or perhaps he thought such discourse more profitable,
if less pleasant, than derisive talk in the opposite sense. At all
events, he gained something and lost nothing by it, even in his own
camp, where swagger might be expected to breed admiration. He was
thought a level-headed fellow who didn’t expect miracles; his forecast
in most matters was quoted, and his defeats at the polls had been to
some extent neutralized by his sagacity in computing the returns in
advance.

So that we may safely follow Mr Winter to the conclusion that the
Liberals of South Fox were somewhat put to it to select a successor to
Robert Farquharson who could be depended upon to keep the party credit
exactly where he found it. The need was unexpected, and the two men
who would have stepped most naturally into Farquharson’s shoes were
disqualified as Winter described. The retirement came at a calculating
moment. South Fox still declared itself with pride an unhealthy division
for Conservatives; but new considerations had thrust themselves among
Liberal counsels, and nobody yet knew what the country would say to
them. The place was a “Grit” strong-hold, but its steady growth as an
industrial centre would give a new significance to the figures of the
next returns. The Conservative was the manufacturers’ party, and had
been ever since the veteran Sir John Macdonald declared for a protective
“National Policy,” and placed the plain issue before the country which
divided the industrial and the agricultural interests. A certain number
of millowners--Mr Milburn mentioned Young and Windle--belonged to the
Liberals, as if to illustrate the fact that you inherit your party in
Canada as you inherit your “denomination,” or your nose; it accompanies
you, simply, to the grave. But they were exceptions, and there was no
doubt that the other side had been considerably strengthened by the
addition of two or three thriving and highly capitalized concerns during
the past five years. Upon the top of this had come the possibility of a
great and dramatic change of trade relations with Great Britain, which
the Liberal Government at Ottawa had given every sign of willingness
to adopt--had, indeed, initiated, and were bound by word and letter to
follow up. Though the moment had not yet come, might never come, for
its acceptance or rejection by the country as a whole, there could be
no doubt that every by-election would be concerned with the policy
involved, and that every Liberal candidate must be prepared to stand by
it in so far as the leaders had conceived and pushed it. Party feeling
was by no means unanimous in favour of the change; many Liberals saw
commercial salvation closer in improved trade relations with the United
States. On the other hand, the new policy, clothed as it was in the
attractive sentiment of loyalty, and making for the solidarity of the
British race, might be depended upon to capture votes which had been
hitherto Conservative mainly because these professions were supposed
to be an indissoluble part of Conservatism. It was a thing to split the
vote sufficiently to bring an unusual amount of anxiety and calculation
into Liberal counsels. The other side were in no doubt or difficulty:
Walter Winter was good enough for them, and it was their cheerful
conviction that Walter Winter would put a large number of people wise
on the subject of preference trade bye-and-bye, who at present only knew
enough to vote for it.

The great question was the practicability of the new idea and how much
further it could safely be carried in a loyal Dominion which was just
getting on its industrial legs. It was debated with anxiety at Ottawa,
and made the subject of special instruction to South Fox, where the
by-election would have all the importance of an early test. “It’s a
clear issue,” wrote an influential person at Ottawa to the local party
leaders at Elgin, “we don’t want any tendency to hedge or double.
It’s straight business with us, the thing we want, and it will be till
Wallingham either gets it through over there, or finds he can’t deal
with us. Meanwhile it might be as well to ascertain just how much there
is in it for platform purposes in a safe spot like South Fox, and how
much the fresh opposition will cost us where we can afford it. We can’t
lose the seat, and the returns will be worth anything in their bearing
on the General Election next year. The objection to Carter is that he’s
only half-convinced; he couldn’t talk straight if he wanted to, and
that lecture tour of his in the United States ten years ago pushing
reciprocity with the Americans would make awkward literature.”

The rejection of Carter practically exhausted the list of men available
whose standing in the town and experience of its suffrages brought them
naturally into the field of selection; and at this point Cruickshank
wrote to Farquharson suggesting the dramatic departure involved in the
name of Lorne Murchison. Cruickshank wrote judiciously, leaving the main
arguments in Lorne’s favour to form themselves in Farquharson’s mind,
but countering the objections that would rise there by the suggestion
that after a long period of confidence and steady going, in fact of
the orthodox and expected, the party should profit by the swing of
the pendulum toward novelty and tentative, rather than bring forward a
candidate who would represent, possibly misrepresent, the same beliefs
and intentions on a lower personal level. As there was no first-rate
man of the same sort to succeed Farquharson, Cruickshank suggested the
undesirability of a second-rate man; and he did it so adroitly that the
old fellow found himself in a good deal of sympathy with the idea. He
had small opinion of the lot that was left for selection, and smaller
relish for the prospect of turning his honourable activity over to any
one of them. Force of habit and training made him smile at Cruickshank’s
proposition as impracticable, but he felt its attraction, even while
he dismissed it to an inside pocket. Young Murchison’s name would be so
unlooked-for that if he, Farquharson, could succeed in imposing it
upon the party it would be almost like making a personal choice of his
successor, a grateful idea in abdication. Farquharson wished regretfully
that Lorne had another five years to his credit in the Liberal record of
South Fox. By the time the young fellow had earned them he, the retiring
member, would be quite on the shelf, if in no completer oblivion; he
could not expect much of a voice in any nomination five years hence. He
sighed to think of it.

It was at that point of his meditations that Mr Farquharson met
Squire Ormiston on the steps of the Bank of British North America, an
old-fashioned building with an appearance of dignity and probity, a look
of having been founded long ago upon principles which raised it above
fluctuation, exactly the place in which Mr Farquharson and Squire
Ormiston might be expected to meet. The two men, though politically
opposed, were excellent friends; they greeted cordially.

“So you’re ordered out of politics, Farquharson?” said the squire.
“We’re all sorry for that, you know.”

“I’m afraid so; I’m afraid so. Thanks for your letter--very friendly of
you, squire. I don’t like it--no use pretending I do--but it seems I’ve
got to take a rest if I want to be known as a going concern.”

“A fellow with so much influence in committee ought to have more control
of his nerve centres,” Ormiston told him. The squire belonged to that
order of elderly gentlemen who will have their little joke. “Well, have
you and Bingham and Horace Williams made up your minds who’s to have the
seat?”

Farquharson shook his head. “I only know what I see in the papers,” he
said. “The Dominion is away out with Fawkes, and the Express is about as
lukewarm with Carter as he is with federated trade.”

“Your Government won’t be obliged to you for Carter,” said Mr Ormiston;
“a more slack-kneed, double-jointed scoundrel was never offered a
commission in a respectable cause. He’ll be the first to rat if things
begin to look queer for this new policy of yours and Wallingham’s.”

“He hasn’t got it yet,” Farquharson admitted, “and he won’t with my good
will. So you’re with us for preference trade, Ormiston?”

“It’s a thing I’d like to see. It’s a thing I’m sorry we’re not in a
position to take up practically ourselves. But you won’t get it, you
know. You’ll be defeated by the senior partner. It’s too much of a
doctrine for the people of England. They’re listening to Wallingham
just now because they admire him, but they won’t listen to you. I doubt
whether it will ever come to an issue over there. This time next year
Wallingham will be sucking his thumbs and thinking of something else.
No, it’s not a thing to worry about politically, for it won’t come
through.”

The squire’s words suggested so much relief in that conviction that
Farquharson, sharp on the flair of the experienced nose for waverers,
looked at him observantly.

“I’m not so sure It’s a doctrine with a fine practical application for
them as well as for us, if they can be got to see it, and they’re bound
to see it in time. It’s a thing I never expected to live to believe,
never thought would be practicable until lately, but now I think there’s
a very good chance of it. And, hang it all,” he added, “it may be
unreasonable, but the more I notice the Yankees making propositions to
get us away from it, the more I want to see it come through.”

“I have very much the same feeling,” the squire acknowledged. “I’ve been
turning the matter over a good deal since that last Conference showed
which way the wind was blowing. And the fellows in your Government gave
them a fine lead. But such a proposition was bound to come from your
side. The whole political history of the country shows it. We’re pledged
to take care of the damned industries.”

Farquharson smiled at the note of depression. “Well, we want a bigger
market somewhere,” he said with detachment “and it looks as if we could
get it now Uncle Sam has had a fright. If the question comes to be
fought out at the polls, I don’t see how your party could do better
than go in for a wide scheme of reciprocity with the Americans--in raw
products, of course with a tariff to match theirs on manufactured goods.
That would shut a pretty tight door on British connection though.”

“They’ll not get my vote if they do,” said the squire, thrusting his
hands fiercely into his breeches pockets.

“As you say, it’s most important to put up a man who will show the
constituency all the credit and benefit there is in it, anyhow,”
 Farquharson observed. “I’ve had a letter this morning,” he added,
laughing, “from a fellow--one of the bosses, too--who wants us to
nominate young Murchison.”

“The lawyer?”

“That’s the man. He’s too young, of course--not thirty. But he’s well
known in the country districts; I don’t know a man of his age with a
more useful service record. He’s got a lot of friends, and he’s come a
good deal to the front lately through that inter-imperial communications
business--we might do worse. And upon my word, we’re in such a hole--”

“Farquharson,” said old Squire Ormiston, the red creeping over features
that had not lost in three generations the lines of the old breed, “I’ve
voted in the Conservative interest for forty years, and my father before
me. We were Whigs when we settled in Massachusetts, and Whigs when we
pulled up stakes and came North rather than take up arms against the
King; but it seemed decent to support the Government that gave us a
chance again under the flag, and my grandfather changed his politics.
Now, confound it! the flag seems to be with the Whigs again, for
fighting purposes, anyhow; and I don’t seem to have any choice. I’ve
been debating the thing for some time now, and your talk of making
that fine young fellow your candidate settles it. If you can get your
committee to accept young Murchison, you can count on my vote, and I
don’t want to brag, but I think you can count on Moneida too, though
it’s never sent in a Grit majority yet.”

The men were standing on the steps of the bank, and the crisp air
of autumn brought them both an agreeable tingle of enterprise.
Farquharson’s buggy was tied to the nearest maple.

“I’m going over to East Elgin to look at my brick-kilns,” he said. “Get
in with me, will you?”

As they drove up Main Street they encountered Walter Winter, who looked
after them with a deeply considering eye.

“Old Ormiston always had the Imperial bee in his bonnet,” said he.



CHAPTER XXIII

Alfred Hesketh was among the first to hear of Lorne’s nomination to
represent the constituency of South Fox in the Dominion Parliament. The
Milburns told him; it was Dora who actually made the communication. The
occasion was high tea; Miss Milburn’s apprehension about Englishmen and
late dinner had been dissipated in great amusement. Mr Hesketh liked
nothing better than high tea, liked nothing so much. He came often to
the Milburns’ after Mrs Milburn said she hoped he would, and pleased her
extremely by the alacrity with which he accepted her first invitation to
stay to what she described as their very simple and unconventional meal.
Later he won her approval entirely by saying boldly that he hoped he was
going to be allowed to stay. It was only in good English society,
Mrs Milburn declared, that you found such freedom and confidence; it
reminded her of Mrs Emmett’s saying that her sister-in-law in London
was always at home to lunch. Mrs Milburn considered a vague project of
informing a select number of her acquaintances that she was always
at home to high tea, but on reflection dismissed it, in case an
inconvenient number should come at once. She would never have gone into
detail, but since a tin of sardines will only hold so many, I may say
for her that it was the part of wisdom.

Mr Hesketh, however, wore the safe and attractive aspect of a single
exceptional instance; there were always sardines enough for him. It
will be imagined what pleasure Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin took in his
visits, how he propped up their standard of behaviour in all things
unessential, which was too likely to be growing limp, so far from
approved examples. I think it was a real aesthetic satisfaction; I know
they would talk of it afterward for hours, with sighing comparisons of
the “form” of the young men of Elgin, which they called beside Hesketh’s
quite outre. It was a favourite word with Mrs Milburn--outre. She used
it like a lorgnette, and felt her familiarity with it a differentiating
mark. Mr Milburn, never so susceptible to delicate distinctions, looked
upon the young Englishman with benevolent neutrality. Dora wished it
to be understood that she reserved her opinion. He might be all that he
seemed, and again he might not. Englishmen were so deep. They might have
nice manners, but they didn’t always act up to them, so far as she had
noticed. There was that Honourable Somebody, who was in jail even
then for trying to borrow money under false pretences from the
Governor-General. Lorne, when she expressed these views to him,
reassured her, but she continued to maintain a guarded attitude upon Mr
Hesketh, to everybody except Mr Hesketh himself.

It was Dora, as I have said, who imparted the news. Lorne had come over
with it in the afternoon, still a little dazed and unbelieving in the
face of his tremendous luck, helped by finding her so readily credulous
to thinking it reasonably possible himself. He could not have done
better than come to Dora for a correction of any undue exaltation that
he might have felt, however. She supplied it in ten minutes by reminding
him of their wisdom in keeping the secret of their relations. His
engagement to the daughter of a prominent Conservative would not indeed
have told in his favour with his party, to say nothing of the anomaly
of Mr Milburn’s unyielding opposition to the new policy. “I never knew
Father so nearly bitter about anything,” Dora said, a statement which
left her lover thoughtful, but undaunted.

“We’ll bring him round,” said Lorne, “when he sees that the British
manufacturer can’t possibly get the better of men on the spot, who know
to a nut the local requirements.”

To which she had responded, “Oh, Lorne, don’t begin THAT again,” and he
had gone away hot-foot for the first step of preparation.

“It’s exactly what I should have expected,” said Hesketh, when she told
him. “Murchison is the very man they want. He’s cut out for a political
success. I saw that when he was in England.”

“You haven’t been very long in the country, Mr Hesketh, or we shouldn’t
hear you saying that,” said Mr Milburn, amicably. “It’s a very
remarkable thing with us, a political party putting forward so young a
man. Now with you I expect a young fellow might get in on his rank
or his wealth--your principle of nonpayment of members confines your
selection more or less. I don’t say you’re not right, but over here we
do pay, you see, and it makes a lot of difference in the competition. It
isn’t a greater honour, but it’s more sought for. I expect there’ll be a
good many sore heads over this business.”

“It’s all the more creditable to Murchison,” said Hesketh.

“Of course it is--a great feather in his cap. Oh, I don’t say young
Murchison isn’t a rising fellow, but it’s foolishness for his party--I
can’t think who is responsible for it. However, they’ve got a pretty
foolish platform just now--they couldn’t win this seat on it with any
man. A lesson will be good for them.”

“Father, don’t you think Lorne will get in?” asked Dora, in a tone of
injury and slight resentment.

“Not by a handful,” said her father. “Mr Walter Winter will represent
South Fox in the next session of Parliament, if you ask my opinion.”

“But, Father,” returned his daughter with an outraged inflection,
“you’ll vote for Lorne?”

A smile went round the table, discreetest in Mrs Milburn.

“I’m afraid not,” said Mr Milburn, “I’m afraid not. Sorry to disoblige,
but principles are principles.”

Dora perceptibly pouted. Mrs Milburn created a diversion with green-gage
preserves. Under cover of it Hesketh asked, “Is he a great friend of
yours?”

“One of my very greatest,” Dora replied. “I know he’ll expect Father to
vote for him. It makes it awfully embarrassing for me.”

“Oh, I fancy he’ll understand!” said Hesketh, easily. “Political
convictions are serious things, you know. Friendship isn’t supposed to
interfere with them. I wonder,” he went on, meditatively, “whether I
could be of any use to Murchison. Now that I’ve made up my mind to
stop till after Christmas I’ll be on hand for the fight. I’ve had some
experience. I used to canvass now and then from Oxford; it was always a
tremendous lark.”

“Oh, Mr Hesketh, DO! Really and truly he is one of my oldest friends,
and I should love to see him get in. I know his sister, too. They’re
a very clever family. Quite self-made, you know, but highly respected.
Promise me you will.”

“I promise with pleasure. And I wish it were something it would give me
more trouble to perform. I like Murchison,” said Hesketh.

All this transpiring while they were supposed to be eating green-gage
preserves, and Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin endeavoured to engage the
head of the house in the kind of easy allusion to affairs of the moment
to which Mr Hesketh would be accustomed as a form of conversation--the
accident to the German Empress, the marriage of one of the Rothschilds.
The ladies were compelled to supply most of the facts and all of the
interest but they kept up a gallant line of attack; and the young man,
taking gratified possession of Dora’s eyes, was extremely obliged to
them.

Hesketh lost no time in communicating his willingness to be of use to
Murchison, and Lorne felt all his old friendliness rise up in him as he
cordially accepted the offer. It was made with British heartiness, it
was thoroughly meant. Lorne was half-ashamed in his recognition of its
quality. A certain aloofness had grown in him against his will since
Hesketh had prolonged his stay in the town, difficult to justify,
impossible to define. Hesketh as Hesketh was worthily admirable as ever,
wholesome and agreeable, as well turned out by his conscience as he was
by his tailor; it was Hesketh in his relation to his new environment
that seemed vaguely to come short. This in spite of an enthusiasm which
was genuine enough; he found plenty of things to like about the country.
It was perhaps in some manifestation of sensitiveness that he failed;
he had the adaptability of the pioneer among rugged conditions, but he
could not mingle quite immediately with the essence of them; he did not
perceive the genius loci. Lorne had been conscious of this as a kind of
undefined grievance; now he specified it and put it down to Hesketh’s
isolation among ways that were different from the ways he knew. You were
bound to notice that Hesketh as a stranger had his own point of view,
his own training to retreat upon.

“I certainly liked him better over there,” Lorne told Advena, “but then
he was a part of it--he wasn’t separated out as he is here. He was just
one sort of fellow that you admired, and there were lots of sorts that
you admired more. Over here you seem to see round him somehow.”

“I shouldn’t have thought it difficult,” said his sister.

“Besides,” Lorne confessed, “I expect it was easier to like him when
you were inclined to like everybody. A person feels more critical of
a visitor, especially when he’s had advantages,” he added honestly.
“I expect we don’t care about having to acknowledge ‘em so very
much--that’s what it comes to.”

“I don’t see them,” said Advena. “Mr Hesketh seems well enough in his
way, fairly intelligent and anxious to be pleasant. But I can’t say I
find him a specially interesting or valuable type.”

“Interesting, you wouldn’t. But valuable--well, you see, you haven’t
been in England--you haven’t seen them over there, crowds of ‘em, piling
up the national character. Hesketh’s an average, and for an average he’s
high. Oh, he’s a good sort--and he just SMELLS of England.”

“He seems all right in his politics,” said John Murchison, filling
his pipe from the tobacco jar on the mantelpiece. “But I doubt whether
you’ll find him much assistance the way he talks of. Folks over here
know their own business--they’ve had to learn it. I doubt if they’ll
take showing from Hesketh.”

“They might be a good deal worse advised.”

“That may be,” said Mr Murchison, and settled down in his armchair
behind the Dominion.

“I agree with Father,” said Advena. “He won’t be any good, Lorne.”

“Advena prefers Scotch,” remarked Stella.

“I don’t know. He’s full of the subject,” said Lorne. “He can present it
from the other side.”

“The side of the British exporter?” inquired his father, looking over
the top of the Dominion with unexpected humour.

“No, sir. Though there are places where we might talk cheap overcoats
and tablecloths and a few odds and ends like that. The side of the
all-British loaf and the lot of people there are to eat it,” said Lorne.
“That ought to make a friendly feeling. And if there’s anything in the
sentiment of the scheme,” he added, “it shouldn’t do any harm to have a
good specimen of the English people advocating it. Hesketh ought to be
an object-lesson.”

“I wouldn’t put too much faith in the object-lesson,” said John
Murchison.

“Neither would I,” said Stella emphatically. “Mister Alfred Hesketh may
pass in an English crowd, but over here he’s just an ignorant young
man, and you’d better not have him talking with his mouth at any of your
meetings. Tell him to go and play with Walter Winter.”

“I heard he was asking at Volunteer Headquarters the other night,”
 remarked Alec, “how long it would be before a man like himself, if he
threw in his lot with the country, could expect to get nominated for a
provincial seat.”

“What did they tell him?” asked Mr Murchison, when they had finished
their laugh.

“I heard they said it would depend a good deal on the size of the lot.”

“And a little on the size of the man,” remarked Advena.

“He said he would be willing to take a seat in a Legislature and work
up,” Alec went on. “Ontario for choice, because he thought the people of
this Province more advanced.”

“There’s a representative committee being formed to give the inhabitants
of the poor-house a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day,” said Advena. “He
might begin with that.”

“I dare say he would if anybody told him. He’s just dying to be taken
into the public service,” Alec said. “He’s in dead earnest about it. He
thinks this country’s a great place because it gives a man the chance of
a public career.”

“Why is it,” asked Advena “that when people have no capacity for private
usefulness they should be so anxious to serve the public?”

“Oh, come,” said Lorne, “Hesketh has an income of his own. Why should
he sweat for his living? We needn’t pride ourselves on being so taken up
with getting ours. A man like that is in a position to do some good, and
I hope Hesketh will get a chance if he stays over here. We’ll soon
see how he speaks. He’s going to follow Farquharson at Jordanville on
Thursday week.”

“I wonder at Farquharson,” said his father.

By this time the candidature of Mr Lorne Murchison was well in the
public eye. The Express announced it in a burst of beaming headlines,
with a biographical sketch and a “cut” of its young fellow-townsman.
Horace Williams, whose hand was plain in every line apologized for the
brevity of the biography--quality rather than quantity, he said; it
was all good, and time would make it better. This did not prevent the
Mercury observing the next evening that the Liberal organ had omitted to
state the age at which the new candidate was weaned. The Toronto papers
commented according to their party bias, but so far as the candidate
was concerned there was lack of the material of criticism. If he had
achieved little for praise he had achieved nothing for detraction.
There was no inconsistent public utterance, no doubtful transaction, no
scandalous paper to bring forward to his detriment. When the fact that
he was but twenty-eight years of age had been exhausted in elaborate
ridicule, little more was available. The policy he championed, however,
lent itself to the widest discussion, and it was instructive to note how
the Opposition press, while continuing to approve the great principle
involved, found material for gravest criticism in the Government’s
projected application of it. Interest increased in the South Fox
by-election as its first touchstone, and gathered almost romantically
about Lorne Murchison as its spirited advocate. It was commonly said
that whether he was returned or not on this occasion, his political
future was assured; and his name was carried up and down the Dominion
with every new wind of imperial doctrine that blew across the Atlantic.
He himself felt splendidly that he rode upon the crest of a wave of
history. However the event appeared which was hidden beyond the horizon,
the great luck of that buoyant emotion, of that thrilling suspense,
would be his in a very special way. He was exhilarated by the sense of
crisis, and among all the conferences and calculations that armed him
for his personal struggle, he would now and then breathe in his private
soul, “Choose quickly, England,” like a prayer.

Elgin rose to its liking for the fellow, and even his political enemies
felt a half-humorous pride that the town had produced a candidate whose
natural parts were held to eclipse the age and experience of party
hacks. Plenty of them were found to declare that Lorne Murchison would
poll more votes for the Grits than any other man they could lay their
hands on, with the saving clause that neither he nor any other man could
poll quite enough this time. They professed to be content to let the
issue have it; meanwhile they congratulated Lorne on his chance, telling
him that a knock or two wouldn’t do him any harm at his age. Walter
Winter, who hadn’t been on speaking terms with Farquharson, made a point
of shaking hands with Murchison in the publicity of the post-office, and
assuring him that he, Winter, never went into a contest more confident
of the straight thing on the part of the other side. Such cavilling
as there was came from the organized support of his own party and had
little importance because it did. The grumblers fell into line almost
as soon as Horace Williams said they would; a little oil, one small
appointment wrung from the Ontario Government--Fawkes, I believe,
got it--and the machine was again in good working order. Lorne even
profited, in the opinion of many, by the fact of his youth, with its
promise of energy and initiative, since Mr Farquharson had lately been
showing the defects as well as the qualities of age and experience, and
the charge of servile timidity was already in the mouths of his critics.

The agricultural community took it, as usual, with phlegm; but there was
a distinct tendency in the bar at Barker’s, on market-days, to lay money
on the colt.



CHAPTER XXIV

Mr Farquharson was to retain his seat until the early spring, for the
double purpose of maintaining his influence upon an important commission
of which he was chairman until the work should be done, and of giving
the imperial departure championed by his successor as good a chance as
possible of becoming understood in the constituency. It was understood
that the new writ would issue for a date in March; Elgin referred all
interest to that point, and prophesied for itself a lively winter.
Another event, of importance less general, was arranged for the end of
February--the arrival of Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon from Scotland.
Finlay had proposed an earlier date, but matters of business connected
with her mother’s estate would delay Miss Cameron’s departure. Her
arrival would be the decisive point of another campaign. He and Advena
faced it without misgiving, but there were moments when Finlay greatly
wished the moment past.

Their intimacy had never been conspicuous, and their determination to
make no change in it could be carried out without attracting attention.
It was very dear to them, that determination. They saw it as a test, as
an ideal. Last of all, perhaps, as an alleviation. They were both too
much encumbered with ideas to move simply, quickly, on the impulse
of passion. They looked at it through the wrong end of the glass, and
thought they put it farther away. They believed that their relation
comprised, would always comprise, the best of life. It was matter for
discussion singularly attractive; they allowed themselves upon it wide
scope in theory. They could speak of it in the heroic temper, without
sadness or bitterness; the thing was to tear away the veil and look fate
in the face. The great thing, perhaps, was to speak of it while still
they could give themselves leave; a day would arrive, they acknowledged
with averted eyes, when dumbness would be more becoming. Meanwhile, Mrs
Murchison would have found it hard to sustain her charge against them
that they talked of nothing but books and authors; the philosophy of
life, as they were intensely creating it, was more entrancing than
any book or any author. Simply and definitely, and to their own
satisfaction, they had abandoned the natural demands of their state;
they lived in its exaltation and were far from accidents. Deep in both
of them was a kind of protective nobility; I will not say it cost them
nothing, but it turned the scenes between them into comedy of the better
sort, the kind that deserves the relief of stone or bronze. Advena,
had she heard it, would have repelled Dr Drummond’s warning with
indignation. If it were so possible to keep their friendship on an
unfaltering level then, with the latitude they had, what danger could
attend them later, when the social law would support them, divide them,
protect them? Dr Drummond, suspecting all, looked grimly on, and from
November to March found no need to invite Mr Finlay to occupy the pulpit
of Knox Church.

They had come to full knowledge that night of their long walk in the
dark together; but even then, in the rush and shock and glory of
it, they had held apart; and their broken avowals had crossed with
difficulty from one to the other. The whole fabric of circumstance was
between them, to realize and to explore; later surveys, as we know,
had not reduced it. They gave it great credit as a barrier; I suppose
because it kept them out of each other’s arms. It had done that.

It was Advena, I fear, who insisted most that they should continue upon
terms of happy debt to one another, the balance always changing, the
account never closed and rendered. She no doubt felt that she might
impose the terms; she had unconsciously the sense of greater sacrifice,
and knew that she had been mistress of the situation long before he
was aware of it. He agreed with joy and with misgiving; he saw with
enthusiasm her high conception of their alliance, but sometimes
wondered, poor fellow, whether he was right in letting it cover him.
He came to the house as he had done before, as often as he could, and
reproached himself that he could not, after all, come very often.

That they should discuss their relation as candidly as they sustained it
was perhaps a little peculiar to them, so I have laid stress on it; but
it was not by any means their sole preoccupation. They talked like
tried friends of their every-day affairs. Indeed, after the trouble and
intoxication of their great understanding had spent itself, it was the
small practical interests of life that seemed to hold them most. One
might think that Nature, having made them her invitation upon the higher
plane, abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the warm human
commonplaces that do her work well enough with the common type. Mrs
Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to
overhear.

“I wouldn’t advise you to have it lined with fur,” Advena was saying.
The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach
about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a
buffalo-skin the following day. “And the buffaloes are all gone, you
know--thirty years ago,” she laughed. “You really are not modern in
practical matters. Does it ever surprise you that you get no pemmican
for dinner, and hardly ever meet an Indian in his feathers?”

He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes. It was a new
discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him, only revealed since
she had come out of her bonds to love; it was hard to say which of them
took the greater pleasure in it.

“What is the use of living in Canada if you can’t have fur on your
clothes?” he demanded.

“You may have a little--astrakhan, I would--on the collar and cuffs,”
 she said. “A fur lining is too hot if there happens to be a thaw, and
then you would leave it off and take cold. You have all the look,” she
added, with a gravely considering glance at him, “of a person who ought
to take care of his chest.”

He withdrew his eyes hurriedly, and fixed them instead on his pipe. He
always brought it with him, by her order, and Advena usually sewed. He
thought as he watched her that it made the silences enjoyable.

“And expensive, I dare say, too,” he said.

“Yes, more or less. Alec paid fifty dollars for his, and never liked
it.”

“Fifty dollars--ten pounds! No vair for me!” he declared. “By the way,
Mrs Firmin is threatening to turn me out of house and home. A married
daughter is coming to live with her, and she wants my rooms.”

“When does she come--the married daughter?”

“Oh, not till the early spring! There’s no immediate despair,” said
Finlay, “but it is dislocating. My books and I had just succeeded in
making room for one another.”

“But you will have to move, in any case, in the early spring.”

“I suppose I will. I had--I might have remembered that.”

“Have you found a house yet?” Advena asked him.

“No.”

“Have you been looking?” It was a gentle, sensible reminder.

“I’m afraid I haven’t.” He moved in his chair as if in physical
discomfort. “Do you think I ought--so soon? There are always plenty
of--houses, aren’t there?”

“Not plenty of desirable ones. Do you think you must live in East
Elgin?”

“It would be rather more convenient.”

“Because there are two semidetached in River Street, just finished, that
look very pretty and roomy. I thought when I saw them that one of them
might be what you would like.”

“Thank you,” he said, and tried not to say it curtly.

“They belong to White, the grocer. River Street isn’t East Elgin, but it
is that way, and it would be a great deal pleasanter for--for her.”

“I must consider that, of course. You haven’t been in them? I should
hope for a bright sitting-room, and a very private study.”

If Advena was aware of any unconscious implication, the pair of eyes she
turned upon him showed no trace of satisfaction in it.

“No, I haven’t. But if I could be of any use I should be very glad to go
over them with you, and--”

She stopped involuntarily, checked by the embarrassment in his face,
though she had to wait for his words to explain it.

“I should be most grateful. But--but might it not be misunderstood?”

She bent her head over her work, and one of those instants passed
between them which he had learned to dread. They were so completely
the human pair as they sat together, withdrawn in comfort and shelter,
absorbed in homely matters and in each other; it was easy to forget that
they were only a picture, a sham, and that the reality lay further on,
in the early spring. It must have been hard for him to hear without
resentment that she was ready to help him to make a home for that
reality. He was fast growing instructed in women, although by a
post-graduate course.

Advena looked up. “Possibly,” she said, calmly, and their agitation
lay still between them. He was silently angry; the thing that stirred
without their leave had been sweet.

“No,” said Advena, “I can’t go, I suppose. I’m sorry. I should have
liked so much to be of use.” She looked up at him appealingly, and
sudden tears came and stood in her eyes, and would perhaps have undone
his hurt but that he was staring into the fire.

“How can you be of use,” he said, almost irritably, “in such ways as
those? They are not important, and I am not sure that for us they are
legitimate. If you were about to be--married”--he seemed to plunge at
the word--“I should not wish either to hasten you or to house you. I
should turn my back on it all. You should have nothing from me,” he went
on, with a forced smile, “but my blessing, delivered over my shoulder.”

“I am sure they are not important,” she said humbly--privately all
unwilling to give up her martyrdom, “but surely they are legitimate. I
would like to help you in every little way I can. Don’t you like me in
your life? You have said that I may stay.”

“I believe you think that by taking strong measures one can exorcise
things,” he said. “That if we could only write out this history of ours
in our hearts’ blood it would somehow vanish.”

“No,” she said, “but I should like to do it all the same.”

“You must bear with me if I refuse the heroic in little. It is even
harder than the other.” He broke off, leaning back and looking at
her from under his shading hand as if that might protect him from too
complete a vision. The firelight was warm on her cheek and hair, her
needle once again completed the dear delusion: she sat there, his wife.
This was an aspect he forbade, but it would return; here it was again.

“It is good to have you in my life,” he said. “It is also good to
recognize one’s possibilities.”

“How can you definitely lose me?” she asked, and he shook his head.

“I don’t know. Now that I have found you it is as if you and I had been
rocked together on the tide of that inconceivable ocean that casts us
half-awake upon life,” he said dreamily. “It isn’t friendship of ideas,
it’s a friendship of spirit. Indeed, I hope and pray never wholly to
lose that.”

“You never will,” she told him. “How many worlds one lives in as the day
goes by with the different people one cares for--one beyond the other,
concentric, ringing from the heart! Yours comprises all the others; it
lies the farthest out--and alas! at present, the closest in,” she added
irresistibly to the asking of his eyes.

“But,” she hurried on, taking high ground to remedy her indiscretion,
“I look forward to the time when this--other feeling of ours will become
just an idea, as it is now just an emotion, at which we should try to
smile. It is the attitude of the gods.”

“And therefore not becoming to men. Why should we, not being gods.
borrow their attitude?” said Finlay.

“I could never kill it,” she put her work in her lap to say, “by any
sudden act of violence. It would seem a kind of suicide. While it rules
it is like one’s life--absolute. But to isolate it--to place it beyond
the currents from the heart--to look at it, and realize it, and conquer
it for what it is--I don’t think it need take so very long. And then our
friendship will be beautiful without reproach.”

“I sometimes fear there may not be time enough in life,” he said. “And
if I find that I must simply go--to British Columbia, I think--those
mining missions would give a man his chance against himself. There is
splendid work to be done there, of a rough-and-ready kind that would
make it puerile to spend time in self-questioning.”

She smiled as if at a violent boy. “We can do it. We can do it here,”
 she said. “May I quote another religion to you? ‘From purification there
arises in the Yogi a thorough discernment of the cause and nature of the
body, whereupon he loses that regard which others have for the bodily
form.’ Then, if he loves, he loves in spirit and in truth. I look
forward to the time,” she went on calmly, “when the best that I can give
you or you can give me will ride upon a glance.”

“I used to feel more drawn to the ascetic achievement and its rewards,”
 he remarked thoughtfully, “than I do now.”

“If I were not a Presbyterian in Canada,” she told him, “I would be a
Buddhist in Burma. But I have inherited the Shorter Catechism; I must
remain without the Law.”

Finlay smiled. “They are the simple,” he said. “Our Law makes wise the
simple.”

Advena looked for a moment into the fire. She was listening, with
admiration, to her heart; she would not be led to consider esoteric
contrasts of East and West.

“Isn’t there something that appeals to you,” she said, “in the thought
of just leaving it, all unsaid and all undone, a dear and tender
projection upon the future that faded--a lovely thing we turned away
from, until one day it was no longer there?”

“Charming,” he said, averting his eyes so that she should not see the
hunger in them. “Charming--literature!”

She smiled and sighed, and he wrenched his mind to the consideration
of the Buddhism of Browning. She followed him obediently, but the lines
they wanted did not come easily; they were compelled to search and
verify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad
activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied
in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun
rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond
the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly,
realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He
constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they
seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration
that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight.
They looked for verses to prove that Browning’s imagination carried him
bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate
whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.

And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management,
and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his
friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common
acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little
she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she
listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon
her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his
overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. “Would it be the
heroic-in-little,” she begged, “to let me mend that?”

As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan
for his admonition. “‘What then art thou doing here, O imagination?’” he
groaned in his private heart. “‘Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for
I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I
am not angry with thee, only go away!’”



CHAPTER XXV

Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire
would be bad for her lover’s political prospects till she made him feel
his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also
hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her
own comfort in the family circle, Mr Milburn having grown by this time
quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the
situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and
never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself
that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of
the ring--imagine, for an instant, if she had been wearing it now! She
would have banished Lorne altogether if she could. As he insisted on
an occasional meeting, she clothed it in mystery, appointing it for an
evening when her mother and aunt were out, and answering his ring at the
door herself. To her family she remarked with detachment that you saw
hardly anything of Lorne Murchison now, he was so taken up with his
old election; and to Hesketh she confided her fear that politics did
interfere with friendship, whatever he might say. He said a good deal,
he cited lofty examples; but the only agreement he could get from her
was the hope that the estrangement wouldn’t be permanent.

“But you are going to say something, Lorne,” she insisted, talking of
the Jordanville meeting.

“Not much,” he told her. “It’s the safest district we’ve got, and they
adore old Farquharson. He’ll do most of the talking--they wouldn’t
thank me for taking up the time. Farquharson is going to tell them I’m a
first-class man, and they couldn’t do better, and I’ve practically only
to show my face and tell them I think so too.”

“But Mr Hesketh will speak?”

“Yes; we thought it would be a good chance of testing him. He may
interest them, and he can’t do much harm, anyhow.”

“Lorne, I should simply love to go. It’s your first meeting.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Mr Murchison, HAVE you taken leave of your senses? Really, you are--”

“All right, I’ll send you. Farquharson and I are going out to the
Crow place to supper, but Hesketh is driving straight there. He’ll be
delighted to bring you--who wouldn’t?”

“I shouldn’t be allowed to go with him alone,” said Dora, thoughtfully.

“Well, no. I don’t know that I’d approve of that myself,” laughed the
confident young man. “Hesketh is driving Mrs Farquharson, and the cutter
will easily hold three. Isn’t it lucky there’s sleighing?”

“Mother couldn’t object to that,” said Dora. “Lorne, I always said you
were the dearest fellow! I’ll wear a thick veil, and not a soul will
know me.”

“Not a soul would in any case,” said Lorne. “It’ll be a Jordanville
crowd, you know--nobody from Elgin.”

“We don’t visit much in Jordanville, certainly. Well, Mother mayn’t
object. She has a great idea of Mrs Farquharson, because she
has attended eleven Drawing-Rooms at Ottawa, and one of them was
given--held, I should say--by the Princess Louise.”

“I won’t promise you eleven,” said Lorne, “but there seems to be a
pretty fair chance of one or two.”

At this she had a tale for him which charmed his ears. “I didn’t know
where to look,” she said. “Aunt Emmie, you know, has a very bad trick
of coming into my room without knocking. Well, in she walked last night,
and found me before the glass PRACTISING MY CURTSEY! I could have killed
her. Pretended she thought I was out.”

“Dora, would you like ME to promise something?” he asked, with a
mischievous look.

“Of course, I would. I don’t care how much YOU promise. What?”

But already he repented of his daring, and sat beside her suddenly
conscious and abashed. Nor could any teasing prevail to draw from him
what had been on his audacious lips to say.

Social precedents are easily established in the country. The accident
that sent the first Liberal canvasser for Jordanville votes to the Crow
place for his supper would be hard to discover now; the fact remains
that he has been going there ever since. It made a greater occasion than
Mrs Crow would ever have dreamed of acknowledging. She saw to it that
they had a good meal of victuals, and affected indifference to the
rest; they must say their say, she supposed. If the occasion had one
satisfaction which she came nearer to confessing than another, it was
that the two or three substantial neighbours who usually came to meet
the politicians left their wives at home, and that she herself, to avoid
giving any offence on this score, never sat down with the men. Quite
enough to do it was, she would explain later, for her and the hired girl
to wait on them and to clear up after them. She and Bella had their
bite afterward when the men had hitched up, and when they could exchange
comments of proud congratulation upon the inroads on the johnny-cake or
the pies. So there was no ill feeling, and Mrs Crow, having vindicated
her dignity by shaking hands with the guests of the evening in the
parlour, solaced it further by maintaining the masculine state of the
occasion, in spite of protests or entreaties. To sit down opposite Mr
Crow would have made it ordinary “company”; she passed the plates and
turned it into a function.

She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in
out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the
yard with the horses. She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with
the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up
and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be
required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life. Her wiry
hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting: you could tell
by the look of them that they were not often crossed there. They were
strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set
mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long,
and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that
would have given a phrenologist his opportunity. It was a different Mrs
Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff
in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs Crow, the
sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure
in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.

The room was heated to express the geniality that was harder to put in
words. The window was shut; there was a smell of varnish and whatever
was inside the “suite” of which Mrs Crow occupied the sofa. Enlarged
photographs--very much enlarged--of Mr and Mrs Crow hung upon the walls,
and one other of a young girl done in that process which tells you at
once that she was an only daughter and that she is dead. There had been
other bereavements; they were written upon the silver coffin-plates
which, framed and glazed, also contributed to the decoration of the
room; but you would have had to look close, and you might feel a
delicacy.

Mrs Crow made her greetings with precision, and sat down again upon the
sofa for a few minutes’ conversation.

“I’m telling them,” said her husband, “that the sleighin’s just held
out for them. If it ‘ud been tomorrow they’d have had to come on wheels.
Pretty soft travellin’ as it was, some places, I guess.”

“Snow’s come early this year,” said Mrs Crow. “It was an open fall,
too.”

“It has certainly,” Mr Farquharson backed her up. “About as early as I
remember it. I don’t know how much you got out here; we had a good foot
in Elgin.”

“‘Bout the same, ‘bout the same,” Mr Crow deliberated, “but it’s been
layin’ light all along over Clayfield way--ain’t had a pair of runners
out, them folks.”

“Makes a more cheerful winter, Mrs Crow, don’t you think, when it comes
early?” remarked Lorne. “Or would you rather not get it till after
Christmas?”

“I don’t know as it matters much, out here in the country. We don’t get
a great many folks passin’, best of times. An’ it’s more of a job to
take care of the stock.”

“That’s so,” Mr Crow told them. “Chores come heavier when there’s snow
on the ground, a great sight, especially if there’s drifts.”

And for an instant, with his knotted hands hanging between his knees
he pondered this unvarying aspect of his yearly experience. They all
pondered it, sympathetic.

“Well, now, Mr Farquharson,” Mrs Crow turned to him. “An’ how reely
BE ye? We’ve heard better, an’ worse, an’ middlin’--there’s ben such
contradictory reports.”

“Oh, very well, Mrs Crow. Never better. I’m going to give a lot more
trouble yet. I can’t do it in politics, that’s the worst of it. But
here’s the man that’s going to do it for me. Here’s the man!”

The Crows looked at the pretendant, as in duty bound, but not any longer
than they could help.

“Why, I guess you were at school with Elmore?” said Crow, as if the idea
had just struck him.

“He may be right peart, for all that,” said Elmore’s mother, and Elmore,
himself, entering with two leading Liberals of Jordanville, effected a
diversion, under cover of which Mrs Crow escaped, to superintend, with
Bella, the last touches to the supper in the kitchen.

Politics in and about Jordanville were accepted as a purely masculine
interest. If you had asked Mrs Crow to take a hand in them she would
have thanked you with sarcasm, and said she thought she had about enough
to do as it was. The school-house, on the night of such a meeting as
this, was recognized to be no place for ladies. It was a man’s affair,
left to the men, and the appearance there of the other sex would
have been greeted with remark and levity. Elgin, as we know, was more
sophisticated in every way, plenty of ladies attended political meetings
in the Drill Shed, where seats as likely as not would be reserved for
them; plenty of handkerchiefs waved there for the encouragement of the
hero of the evening. They did not kiss him; British phlegm, so far, had
stayed that demonstration at the southern border.

The ladies of Elgin, however, drew the line somewhere, drew it at
country meetings. Mrs Farquharson went with her husband because, since
his state of health had handed him over to her more than ever, she saw
it a part of her wifely duty. His retirement had been decided upon for
the spring, but she would be on hand to retire him at any earlier moment
should the necessity arise. “We’ll be the only female creatures there,
my dear,” she had said to Dora on the way out, and Hesketh had praised
them both for public spirit. He didn’t know, he said, how anybody would
get elected in England without the ladies, especially in the villages,
where the people were obliged to listen respectfully.

“I wonder you can afford to throw away all the influence you get in
the rural districts with soup and blankets,” he said; “but this is an
extravagant country in many ways.” Dora kept silence, not being sure of
the social prestige bound up with the distribution of soup and blankets,
but Mrs Farquharson set him sharply right.

“I guess we’d rather do without our influence if it came to that,” she
said.

Hesketh listened with deference to her account of the rural district
which had as yet produced no Ladies Bountiful, made mental notes
of several points, and placed her privately as a woman of more than
ordinary intelligence. I have always claimed for Hesketh an open mind;
he was filling it now, to its capacity, with care and satisfaction.

The schoolroom was full and waiting when they arrived. Jordanville had
been well billed, and the posters held, in addition to the conspicuous
names of Farquharson and Murchison, that of Mr Alfred Hesketh (of
London, England). There was a “send-off” to give to the retiring member,
there was a critical inspection to make of the new candidate, and
there was Mr Alfred Hesketh, of London, England, and whatever he
might signify. They were big, quiet, expectant fellows, with less
sophistication and polemic than their American counterparts, less stolid
aggressiveness than their parallels in England, if they have parallels
there. They stood, indeed, for the development between the two; they
came of the new country but not of the new light; they were democrats
who had never thrown off the monarch--what harm did he do there
overseas? They had the air of being prosperous, but not prosperous
enough for theories and doctrines. The Liberal vote of South Fox had
yet to be split by Socialism or Labour. Life was a decent rough business
that required all their attention; there was time enough for sleep
but not much for speculation. They sat leaning forward with their
hats dropped between their knees, more with the air of big schoolboys
expecting an entertainment than responsible electors come together to
approve their party’s choice. They had the uncomplaining bucolic look,
but they wore it with a difference; the difference, by this time, was
enough to mark them of another nation. Most of them had driven to the
meeting; it was not an adjournment from the public house. Nor did the
air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour
was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider,
and the room was full of patient good will.

The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had
supped with the speakers, and Mr Crow had given him a friendly hint that
the boys wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of trimmings from HIM.
Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr Farquharson.
It diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young
fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had
somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his
constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their
representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and
note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he
could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business
chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson
made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there
were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate
by their own schoolhouse. He approached them, as he had always done on
the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual
friendly business. “You know and I know,” he said more than once; they
and he knew a number of things together.

He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn’t chased him out of
politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no
choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for
the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance
in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised
to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the
main heads of that attractive prospect and, agreeable as the subject,
great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded
by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his
successor for this constituency, Mr Lorne Murchison, and by his friend
from the old country, Mr Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take
the words out of the mouths of these gentlemen, much as he envied them
the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that
illustrious body of literary and scientific men, had a custom, on the
death of a member and the selection of his successor, of appointing one
of their number to eulogize the newcomer. The person upon whom the task
would most appropriately fall, did circumstances permit, would be the
departing academician. In this case, he was happy to say, circumstances
did permit--his political funeral was still far enough off to enable him
to express his profound confidence in and his hearty admiration of the
young and vigorous political heir whom the Liberals of South Fox had
selected to stand in his shoes. Mr Farquharson proceeded to give his
grounds for this confidence and admiration, reminding the Jordanville
electors that they had met Mr Murchison as a Liberal standard-bearer in
the last general election, when he, Farquharson, had to acknowledge
very valuable services on Mr Murchison’s part. The retiring member then
thanked his audience for the kind attention and support they had given
him for so many years, made a final cheerful joke about a Pagan divinity
known as Anno Domini, and took his seat.

They applauded him, and it was plain that they regretted him, the tried
friend, the man there was never any doubt about, whose convictions they
had repeated, and whose speeches in Parliament they had read with a kind
of proprietorship for so long. The Chair had to wait, before introducing
Mr Alfred Hesketh, until the backbenchers had got through with a double
rendering of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which bolder spirits sent
lustily forth from the anteroom where the little girls kept their hats
and comforters, interspersed with whoops. Hesketh, it had been arranged,
should speak next, and Lorne last.

Mr Hesketh left his wooden chair with smiling ease, the ease which is
intended to level distinctions and put everybody concerned on the
best of terms. He said that though he was no stranger to the work
of political campaigns, this was the first time that he had had the
privilege of addressing a colonial audience. “I consider,” said he
handsomely, “that it is a privilege.” He clasped his hands behind his
back and threw out his chest.

“Opinions have differed in England as to the value of the colonies, and
the consequence of colonials. I say here with pride that I have
ever been among those who insist that the value is very high and the
consequence very great. The fault is common to humanity, but we are, I
fear, in England, too prone to be led away by appearances, and to forget
that under a rough unpolished exterior may beat virtues which are the
brightest ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the
possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from
the Algonquins and the--and the other savages--may be hidden the most
glorious period of the British race.”

Mr Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity
for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at
him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest
in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality
as it offered itself to them--it was a thing new and strange. Far out
in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all
the summer, Hesketh’s would have been a voice from home; but here, in
long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other
things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising
with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.

“If we in England,” Hesketh proceeded, “required a lesson--as perhaps we
did--in the importance of the colonies, we had it; need I remind you? in
the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did
the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial
sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of
Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to
attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate
that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and
victories to the British cause.”

Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome
lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated
on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England
to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and
dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood
of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever
forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and
irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive
comment “Yah!”

Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh
sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation--

   What should they know of England
   Who only England know?

which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear. His
audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment. The same
voice from the anteroom inquired ironically, “That so?” and the speaker
felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.

He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country
to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal
party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had
at heart--the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the
mother country. He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having
shown themselves capable of this great function--a point at which he was
again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments
about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the
army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to
all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother
country in time of war. Here he quoted a noble lord. He said that he
believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand
how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new
arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to
have nothing to do with it.

“England,” he said, loftily, “has no wish to buy the loyalty of her
colonies, nor, I hope, has any colony the desire to offer her allegiance
at the price of preference in British markets. Even proposals for mutual
commercial benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier
principles than those of the market-place and the counting-house.”

At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher commercial
plane, exclaimed, “How be ye goin’ to get ‘em kept to, then?”

Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the audience asked
how they were to ensure that such arrangements would be adhered to. His
answer was in the words of the Duke of Dartmoor, “By the mutual esteem,
the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of the British race.”

Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless, at his own
incapacity to follow this high doctrine, exclaimed intemperately, “Oh,
shut up!” and the gathering, remembering that this, after all, was
not what it had come for, began to hint that it had had enough in
intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for “Murchison!”

Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer. He had a
trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he thought they would take as
a direct message from the distinguished nobleman who had uttered it.
The Marquis of Aldeburgh was the father of the pithy thing, which he had
presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The audience received
it with respect--Hesketh’s own respect was so marked--but with
misapprehension; there had been too many allusions to the nobility for a
community so far removed from its soothing influence. “Had ye no friends
among the commoners?” suddenly spoke up a dry old fellow, stroking a
long white beard; and the roar that greeted this showed the sense of the
meeting. Hesketh closed with assurances of the admiration and confidence
he felt toward the candidate proposed to their suffrages by the
Liberal party that were quite inaudible, and sought his yellow pinewood
schoolroom chair with rather a forced smile. It had been used once
before that day to isolate conspicuous stupidity.

They were at bottom a good-natured and a loyal crowd, and they had not,
after all, come there to make trouble, or Mr Alfred Hesketh might have
carried away a worse opinion of them. As it was, young Murchison,
whose address occupied the rest of the evening, succeeded in making
an impression upon them distinct enough, happily for his personal
influence, to efface that of his friend. He did it by the simple
expedient of talking business, and as high prices for produce and low
ones for agricultural implements would be more interesting there than
here, I will not report him. He and Mr Farquharson waited, after the
meeting, for a personal word with a good many of those present, but it
was suggested to Hesketh that the ladies might be tired, and that he had
better get them home without unnecessary delay. Mrs Farquharson had less
comment to offer during the drive home than Hesketh thought might be
expected from a woman of her intelligence, but Miss Milburn was very
enthusiastic. She said he had made a lovely speech, and she wished her
father could have heard it.

A personal impression, during a time of political excitement, travels
unexpectedly far. A week later Mr Hesketh was concernedly accosted in
Main Street by a boy on a bicycle.

“Say, mister, how’s the dook?”

“What duke?” asked Hesketh, puzzled.

“Oh, any dook,” responded the boy, and bicycled cheerfully, away.



CHAPTER XXVI

Christmas came and went. Dr Drummond had long accepted the innovation
of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the
collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to
the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive by his business
instinct, in everything but theology, where perhaps his business
instinct also operated the other way, in favour of the sure thing. The
Christmas Day service soon became one of those “special” occasions so
dear to his heart, which made a demand upon him out of the ordinary way.
He rose to these on the wing of the eagle, and his congregation never
lacked the lesson that could be most dramatically drawn from them. His
Christmas Day discourse gathered everything into it that could emphasize
the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints’ days and
ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession
of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism
was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual.
The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and
invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of
the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus
preserved, and principle relentlessly indicated.

Dr Drummond loved, as I have said, all that asked for notable comment;
the poet and the tragedian in him caught at the opportunity, and
revelled in it. Public events carried him far, especially if they were
disastrous, but what he most profited by was the dealing of Providence
with members of his own congregation. Of all the occasions that inspired
him, the funeral sermon was his happiest opportunity, nor was it, in his
hands, by any means unstinted eulogy. Candid was his summing-up, behind
the decent veil, the accepted apology of death; he was not afraid to
refer to the follies of youth or the weaknesses of age in terms as
unmistakable as they were kindly.

“Grace,” he said once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed
away, “did more for her than ever nature had done.” He repeated it, too.
“She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature,” and before
his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget
the note in his voice when the loss he deplored was that of a youth of
virtue and promise, or that of a personal friend. His very text would be
a blow upon the heart; the eyes filled from the beginning. People would
often say that they were “sorry for the family,” sitting through Dr
Drummond’s celebration of their bereavement; and the sympathy was
probably well founded. But how fine he was when he paid the last tribute
to that upright man, his elder and office-bearer, David Davidson! How
his words marched, sorrowing to the close! “Much I have said of him,
and more than he would have had me say.” Will it not stay with those who
heard it till the very end, the trenchant, mournful fall of that “more
than he would have had me say”?

It was a thing that Hugh Finlay could not abide in Dr Drummond.

As the winter passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his
hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in
the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly
than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him,
a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic
incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change
of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr Drummond liked a pretty
definite parallel; he had small opinion of the practice of drawing a
pint out of a thimble, as he considered Finlay must have done when he
preached the gospel of imperialism from Deuteronomy XXX, 14. “But the
word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou
mayest do it.” Moreover, to preach politics in Knox Church was a liberty
in Finlay.

The fact that Finlay had been beforehand with him operated perhaps to
reconcile the Doctor to his difficulty; and the candidature of one of
his own members in what was practically the imperial interest no doubt
increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless, he would not lose sight of
the matter for more than two or three weeks together. Many an odd blow
he delivered for its furtherance by way of illustrating higher things,
and he kept it always, so to speak, in the practical politics of the
long prayer.

It was Sunday evening, and Abby and her husband, as usual, had come to
tea. The family was complete with the exception of Lorne, who had driven
out to Clayfield with Horace Williams, to talk over some urgent matters
with persons whom he would meet at supper at the Metropole Hotel
at Clayfield. It was a thing Mrs Murchison thought little short of
scandalous--supper to talk business on the Sabbath day, and in a hotel,
a place of which the smell about the door was enough to knock you down,
even on a weekday. Mrs Murchison considered, and did not scruple to say
so, that politics should be left alone on Sundays. Clayfield votes
might be very important, but there were such things as commandments,
she supposed. “It’ll bring no blessing,” she declared severely, eyeing
Lorne’s empty place.

The talk about the lamplit table was, nevertheless, all of the election,
blessed or unblessed. It was not in human nature that it shouldn’t be,
as Mrs Murchison would have very quickly told you if you had found her
inconsistent. There was reason in all things, as she frequently said.

“I hear,” Alec had told them, “that Octavius Milburn is going around
bragging he’s got the Elgin Chamber of Commerce consolidated this time.”

“Against us?” exclaimed Stella; and her brother said, “Of course!”

“Those Milburns,” remarked Mrs Murchison, “are enough to make one’s
blood boil. I met Mrs Milburn in the market yesterday; she’d been
pricing Mrs Crow’s ducks, and they were just five cents too dear for
her, and she stopped--wonderful thing for her--and had SUCH an amount
to say about Lorne, and the honour it was, and the dear only knows what!
Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth--and Octavius Milburn doing all
he knew against him the whole time! That’s the Milburns! I cut her
remarkably short,” Mrs Murchison added, with satisfaction, “and when
she’d made up her mind she’d have to give that extra five cents for
the ducks because there weren’t any others to be had, she went back and
found I’d bought them.”

“Well done, Mother!” said Alec, and Oliver remarked that if those were
today’s ducks they were too good for the Milburn crowd, a lot.

“I expect she wanted them, too,” remarked Stella. “They’ve got the only
Mr Hesketh staying with them now. Miss Filkin’s in a great state of
excitement.”

“I guess we can spare them Hesketh,” said John Murchison.

“He’s a lobster,” said Stella with fervour.

“He seems to bring a frost where he goes,” continued Abby’s husband,
“in politics, anyhow. I hear Lorne wants to make a present of him to the
other side, for use wherever they’ll let him speak longest. Is it true
he began his speech out at Jordanville--‘Gentlemen--and those of you who
are not gentlemen’?”

“Could he have meant Mrs Farquharson and Miss Milburn?” asked Mr
Murchison quietly, when the derision subsided; and they laughed again.

“He told me,” said Advena, “that he proposed to convert Mr Milburn to
the imperial policy.”

“He’ll have his job cut out for him,” said her father.

“For my part,” Abby told them, “I think the Milburns are beneath
contempt. You don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something ABOUT
them--not that we ever come in contact with them,” she continued with
dignity. “I believe they used to be patients of Dr Henry’s till he got
up in years, but they don’t call in Harry.”

“Maybe that’s what there is about them,” said Mr Murchison, innocently.

“Father’s made up his mind,” announced Dr Harry, and they waited,
breathless. There could be only one point upon which Dr Henry could be
dubitating at that moment.

“He’s going to vote for Lorne.”

“He’s a lovely old darling!” cried Stella. “Good for Dr Henry Johnson! I
knew he would.”

The rest were silent with independence and gratification. Dr Henry’s
Conservatism had been supposed to be invincible. Dr Harry they thought
a fair prey to Murchison influence, and he had capitulated early, but he
had never promised to answer for his father.

“Yes, he’s taken his time about it, and he’s consulted about all the
known authorities,” said his son, humorously. “Went right back to the
Manchester school to begin with--sat out on the verandah reading Cobden
and Bright the whole summer; if anybody came for advice sent ‘em in to
me. I did a trade, I tell you! He thought they talked an awful lot of
sense, those fellows--from the English point of view. ‘D’ye mean to tell
me,’ he’d say, ‘that a generation born and bred in political doctrine
of that sort is going to hold on to the colonies at a sacrifice? They’d
rather let ‘em go at a sacrifice!’ Well, then he got to reading the
other side of the question, and old Ormiston lent him Parkin, and he
lent old Ormiston Goldwin Smith, and then he subscribed to the Times for
six months--the bill must have nearly bust him; and then the squire went
over without waiting for him and without any assistance from the Times
either; and finally--well, he says that if it’s good enough business for
the people of England it’s good enough business for him. Only he keeps
on worrying about the people of England, and whether they’ll make enough
by it to keep them contented, till he can’t next month all right, he
wants it to be distinctly understood that family connection has nothing
to do with it.”

“Of course it hasn’t,” Advena said.

“But we’re just as much obliged,” remarked Stella.

“A lot of our church people are going to stay at home election day,”
 declared Abby; “they won’t vote for Lorne, and they won’t vote against
imperialism, so they’ll just sulk. Silly, I call it.”

“Good enough business for us,” said Alec.

“Well, what I want to know is,” said Mrs Murchison, “whether you are
coming to the church you were born and brought up in, Abby, or not,
tonight? There’s the first bell.”

“I’m not going to any church.” said Abby. “I went this morning. I’m
going home to my baby.”

“Your father and mother,” said Mrs Murchison, “can go twice a day, and
be none the worse for it. By the way, Father, did you know old Mrs Parr
was dead? Died this morning at four o’clock. They telephoned for Dr
Drummond, and I think they had little to do, for he had been up with her
half the night already, Mrs Forsyth told me.”

“Did he go?” asked Mr Murchison.

“He did not, for the very good reason that he knew nothing about it. Mrs
Forsyth answered the telephone, and told them he hadn’t been two hours
in his bed, and she wouldn’t get him out again for an unconscious
deathbed, and him with bronchitis on him and two sermons to preach
today.”

“I’ll warrant Mrs Forsyth caught it in the morning,” said John
Murchison.

“That she did. The doctor was as cross as two sticks that she hadn’t had
him out to answer the phone. ‘I just spoke up,’ she said, ‘and told him
I didn’t see how he was going to do any good to the pour soul over a
telephone wire.’ ‘It isn’t that,’ he said, ‘but I might have put them
on to Peter Fratch for the funeral. We’ve never had an undertaker in the
church before,’ he said; ‘he’s just come, and he ought to be supported.
Now I expect it’s too late, they’ll have gone to Liscombe.’ He rang them
up right away, but they had.”

“Dr Drummond can’t stand Liscombe,” said Alec, as they all laughed a
little at the Doctor’s foible, all except Advena, who laughed a
great deal. She laughed wildly, then weakly. “I wouldn’t--think it a
pleasure--to be buried by Liscombe myself!” she cried hysterically, and
then laughed again until the tears ran down her face, and she lay back
in her chair and moaned, still laughing.

Mr and Mrs Murchison, Alec, Stella, and Advena made up the family party;
Oliver, for reasons of his own, would attend the River Avenue Methodist
Church that evening. They slipped out presently into a crisp white
winter night. The snow was banked on both sides of the street. Spreading
garden fir trees huddled together weighted down with it; ragged icicles
hung from the eaves or lay in long broken fingers on the trodden paths.
The snow snapped and tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon
that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness, and
etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic,
almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in
upon its own soul of the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and
the silence, for a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels
or other strangers to mark with curiosity. Mr and Mrs Murchison were
neither angels nor strangers; they looked at it and saw that the
Peterson place was still standing empty, and that old Mr Fisher hadn’t
finished his new porch before zero weather came to stop him.

The young people were well ahead; Mrs Murchison, on her husband’s arm,
stepped along with the spring of an impetus undisclosed.

“Is it to be the Doctor tonight?” asked John Murchison. “He was so
hoarse this morning I wouldn’t be surprised to see Finlay in the pulpit.
They’re getting only morning services in East Elgin just now, while
they’re changing the lighting arrangements.”

“Are they, indeed? Well, I hope they’ll change them and be done with
it, for I can’t say I’m anxious for too much of their Mr Finlay in Knox
Church.”

“Oh, you like the man well enough for a change, Mother!” John assured
her.

“I’ve nothing to say against his preaching. It’s the fellow himself. And
I hope we won’t get him tonight for, the way I feel now, if I see him
gawking up the pulpit steps it’ll be as much as I can do to keep in my
seat, and so I just tell you, John.”

“You’re a little out of patience with him, I see,” said Mr Murchison.

“And it would be a good thing if more than me were out of patience with
him. There’s such a thing as too much patience, I’ve noticed.”

“I dare say,” replied her husband, cheerfully.

“If Advena were any daughter of mine she’d have less patience with him.”

“She’s not much like you,” assented the father.

“I must say I like a girl to have a little spirit if a man has none. And
before I’d have him coming to the house week after week the way he has,
I’d see him far enough.”

“He might as well come there as anywhere,” Mr Murchison replied,
ambiguously. “I suppose he has now and then time on his hands?”

“Well, he won’t have it on his hands much longer.”

“He won’t, eh?”

“No, he won’t,” Mrs Murchison almost shook the arm she was attached to.
“John, I think you might show a little interest! The man’s going to be
married.”

“You don’t say that?” John Murchison’s tone expressed not only
astonishment but concern. Mrs Murchison was almost mollified.

“But I do say it. His future wife is coming here to Elgin next month,
she and her aunt, or her grandmother, or somebody, and they’re to stay
at Dr Drummond’s and be married as soon as possible.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr Murchison, which was his way of expressing simple
astonishment.

“There’s no nonsense about it. Advena told me herself this afternoon.”

“Did she seem put out about it?”

“She’s not a girl to show it,” Mrs Murchison hedged, “if she was. I just
looked at her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a piece of news. When did you
hear it?’ I said. ‘Oh, I’ve known it all the winter!’ says my lady. What
I wanted to say was that for an engaged man he had been pretty liberal
with his visits, but she had such a queer look in her eyes I couldn’t
express myself, somehow.”

“It was just as well left unsaid,” her husband told her, thoughtfully.

“I’m not so sure,” Mrs Murchison retorted. “You’re a great man, John,
for letting everything alone. When he’s been coming here regularly for
more than a year, putting ideas into the girl’s head--”

“He seems to have told her how things were.”

“That’s all very well--if he had kept himself to himself at the same
time.”

“Well, Mother, you know you never thought much of the prospect.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mrs Murchison said. “It wouldn’t be me that would be
married to him, and I’ve always said so. But I’d got more or less used
to it,” she confessed. “The man’s well enough in some ways. Dear knows
there would be a pair of them--one’s as much of a muddler as the other!
And anybody can see with half an eye that Advena likes him. It hasn’t
turned out as I expected, that’s a fact, John, and I’m just very much
annoyed.”

“I’m not best pleased about it myself,” said John Murchison, expressing,
as usual, a very small proportion of the regret that he felt, “but I
suppose they know their own business.”

Thus, in their different ways, did these elder ones also acknowledge
their helplessness before the advancing event. They could talk of it in
private and express their dissatisfaction with it, and that was all they
could do. It would not be a matter much further turned over between
them at best. They would be shy of any affair of sentiment in terms of
speech, and from one that affected a member of the family, self-respect
would help to pull them the other way. Mrs Murchison might remember it
in the list of things which roused her vain indignation; John Murchison
would put it away in the limbo of irremediables that were better
forgotten. For the present they had reached the church door.

Mrs Murchison saw with relief that Dr Drummond occupied his own pulpit,
but if her glance had gone the length of three pews behind her she
would have discovered that Hugh Finlay made one of the congregation.
Fortunately, perhaps, for her enjoyment of the service, she did not
look round. Dr Drummond was more observing, but his was a position
of advantage. In the accustomed sea of faces two, heavy shadowed and
obstinately facing fate, swam together before Dr Drummond, and after he
had lifted his hands and closed his eyes for the long prayer he saw them
still. So that these words occurred, near the end, in the long prayer--

“O Thou Searcher of hearts, who hast known man from the beginning, to
whom his highest desires and his loftiest intentions are but as
the desires and intentions of a little child, look with Thine own
compassion, we beseech Thee, upon souls before Thee in any peculiar
difficulty. Our mortal life is full of sin, it is also full of the
misconception of virtue. Do Thou clear the understanding, O Lord, of
such as would interpret Thy will to their own undoing; do Thou teach
them that as happiness may reside in chastening, so chastening may
reside in happiness. And though such stand fast to their hurt, do Thou
grant to them in Thine own way, which may not be our way, a safe issue
out of the dangers that beset them.”

Dr Drummond had his own method of reconciling foreordination and free
will. To Advena his supplication came with that mysterious double
emphasis of chance words that fit. Her thought played upon them all
through the sermon, rejecting and rejecting again their application
and their argument and the spring of hope in them. She, too, knew that
Finlay was in church and, half timidly, she looked back for him, as the
congregation filed out again into the winter streets. But he, furious,
and more resolved than ever, had gone home by another way.



CHAPTER XXVII

Octavius Milburn was not far beyond the facts when he said that the
Elgin Chamber of Commerce was practically solid this time against the
Liberal platform, though to what extent this state of things was due
to his personal influence might be a matter of opinion. Mr Milburn was
President of the Chamber of Commerce, and his name stood for one of
the most thriving of Elgin’s industries, but he was not a person of
influence except as it might be represented in a draft on the Bank of
British North America. He had never converted anybody to anything, and
never would, possibly because the governing principle of his life was
the terror of being converted to anything himself. If an important
nonentity is an imaginable thing, perhaps it would stand for Mr Milburn;
and he found it a more valuable combination than it may appear, since
his importance gave him position and opportunity, and his nonentity
saved him from their risks. Certainly he had not imposed his view upon
his fellow-members--they would have blown it off like a feather--yet
they found themselves much of his mind. Most of them were manufacturing
men of the Conservative party, whose factories had been nursed by high
duties upon the goods of outsiders, and few even of the Liberals among
them felt inclined to abandon this immediate safeguard for a benefit
more or less remote, and more or less disputable. John Murchison
thought otherwise, and put it in few words as usual. He said he was more
concerned to see big prices in British markets for Canadian crops than
he was to put big prices on ironware he couldn’t sell. He was more
afraid of hard times among the farmers of Canada than he was of
competition by the manufacturers of England. That is what he said when
he was asked if it didn’t go against the grain a little to have to
support a son who advocated low duties on British ranges; and when he
was not asked he said nothing, disliking the discount that was naturally
put upon his opinion. Parsons, of the Blanket Mills, bolted at the first
hint of the new policy and justified it by reminding people that he
always said he would if it ever looked like business.

“We give their woollen goods a pull of a third as it is,” he said,
“which is just a third more than I approve of. I don’t propose to vote
to make it any bigger--can’t afford it.”

He had some followers, but there were also some, like Young, of the
Plough Works, and Windle, who made bicycles, who announced that there
was no need to change their politics to defeat a measure that had no
existence, and never would have. What sickened them, they declared, was
to see young Murchison allowed to give it so much prominence as Liberal
doctrine. The party had been strong enough to hold South Fox for the
best part of the last twenty years on the old principles, and this
British boot-licking feature wasn’t going to do it any good. It was fool
politics in the opinion of Mr Young and Mr Windle.

Then remained the retail trades, the professions, and the farmers. Both
sides could leave out of their counsels the interests of the leisured
class, since the leisured class in Elgin consisted almost entirely of
persons who were too old to work, and therefore not influential. The
landed proprietors were the farmers, when they weren’t, alas! the banks.
As to the retail men, the prosperity of the stores of Main Street and
Market Street was bound up about equally with that of Fox County and
the Elgin factories. The lawyers and doctors, the odd surveyors and
engineers, were inclined, by their greater detachment, to theories and
prejudices, delightful luxuries where a certain rigidity of opinion
is dictated by considerations of bread and butter. They made a factor
debatable, but small. The farmers had everything to win, nothing to
lose. The prospect offered them more for what they had to sell, and less
for what they had to buy, and most of them were Liberals already; but
the rest had to be convinced, and a political change of heart in a bosom
of South Fox was as difficult as any other. Industrial, commercial,
professional, agricultural, Lorne Murchison scanned them all hopefully,
but Walter Winter felt them his garnered sheaves.

It will be imagined how Mr Winter, as a practical politician, rejoiced
in the aspect of things. The fundamental change, with its incalculable
chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment
in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the
second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in
politics--and if there was a weapon Mr Winter owned a weakness for it
was satire--the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him
down to the ground. He professed himself, though no optimist under any
circumstances very well pleased. Only in one other place, he declared,
would he have preferred to conduct a campaign at the present moment on
the issue involved, though he would have to change his politics to do
it there, and that place was England. He cast an envious eye across
the ocean at the trenchant argument of the dear loaf; he had no such
straight road to the public stomach and grand arbitrator of the fate of
empires. If the Liberals in England failed to turn out the Government
over this business, they would lose in his eyes all the respect he ever
had for them, which wasn’t much, he acknowledged. When his opponents
twitted him with discrepancy here, since a bargain so bad for one side
could hardly fail to favour the other, he poured all his contempt on the
scheme as concocted by damned enthusiasts for the ruin of businessmen of
both countries. Such persons, Mr Winter said, if they could have their
way, would be happy and satisfied; but in his opinion neither England
nor the colonies could afford to please them as much as that. He
professed loud contempt for the opinions of the Conservative party
organs at Toronto, and stood boldly for his own views. That was what
would happen, he declared, in every manufacturing division in the
country, if the issue came to be fought in a general election. He was
against the scheme, root and branch.

Mr Winter was skilled, practised, and indefatigable. We need not follow
him in all his ways and works; a good many of his arguments, I fear,
must also escape us. The Elgin Mercury, if consulted, would produce
them in daily disclosure; so would the Clayfield Standard. One of these
offered a good deal of sympathy to Mayor Winter, the veteran of so many
good fights, in being asked to contest South Fox with an opponent who
had not so much as a village reeveship to his public credit. If the
Conservative candidate felt the damage to his dignity, however, he
concealed it.

In Elgin and Clayfield, where factory chimneys had also begun to point
the way to enterprise, Winter had a clear field. Official reports gave
him figures to prove the great and increasing prosperity of the country,
astonishing figures of capital coming in, of emigrants landing, of new
lands broken, new mineral regions exploited, new railways projected, of
stocks and shares normal safe, assured. He could ask the manufacturers
of Elgin to look no further than themselves, which they were quite
willing to do, for illustration of the plenty and the promise which
reigned in the land from one end to the other. He could tell them that
in their own Province more than one hundred new industries had been
established in the last year. He could ask them, and he did ask them,
whether this was a state of things to disturb with an inrush from
British looms and rolling mills, and they told him with applause that it
was not.

Country audiences were not open to arguments like these; they were
slow in the country, as the Mercury complained, to understand that
agricultural prospects were bound up with the prosperity of the towns
and cities; they had been especially slow in the country in England, as
the Express ironically pointed out, to understand it. So Winter and
his supporters asked the farmers of South Fox if they were prepared to
believe all they heard of the good will of England to the colonies, with
the flattering assumption that they were by no means prepared to believe
it. Was it a likely thing, Mr Winter inquired, that the people of Great
Britain were going to pay more for their flour and their bacon, their
butter and their cheese, than they had any need to do, simply out of a
desire to benefit countries which most of them had never seen, and never
would see? No, said Mr Winter, they might take it from him, that was not
the idea. But Mr Winter thought there was an idea, and that they and he
together would not have much trouble in deciphering it. He did not claim
to be longer-sighted in politics than any other man, but he thought the
present British idea was pretty plain. It was, in two words, to secure
the Canadian market for British goods, and a handsome contribution from
the Canadian taxpayer toward the expense of the British army and navy,
in return for the offer of favours to food supplies from Canada. But
this, as they all knew, was not the first time favours had been offered
by the British Government to food supplies from Canada. Just sixty years
ago the British Government had felt one of these spasms of benevolence
to Canada, and there were men sitting before him who could remember the
good will and the gratitude, the hope and the confidence, that greeted
Stanley’s bill of that year, which admitted Canadian wheat and flour at
a nominal duty. Some could remember, and those who could not remember
could read; how the farmers and the millers of Ontario took heart and
laid out capital, and how money was easy and enterprise was everywhere,
and how agricultural towns such as Elgin was at that time sent up
streets of shops to accommodate the trade that was to pour in under
the new and generous “preference” granted to the Dominion by the mother
country. And how long, Mr Winter demanded, swinging round in that
pivotal manner which seems assisted by thumbs in the armholes of the
waistcoat, how long did the golden illusion last? Precisely three
years. In precisely three years the British nation compelled the British
Government to adopt the Free Trade Act of ‘46. The wheat of the world
flowed into every port in England, and the hopes of Canada, especially
the hopes of Ontario, based then, as now, on “preferential” treatment,
were blasted to the root. Enterprise was laid flat, mortgages were
foreclosed, shops were left empty, the milling and forwarding interests
were temporarily ruined, and the Governor-General actually wrote to
the Secretary of State in England that things were so bad that not a
shilling could be raised on the credit of the Province.

Now Mr Winter did not blame the people of England for insisting on free
food. It was the policy that suited their interests, and they had just
as good a right to look after their interests, he conceded handsomely,
as anybody else. But he did blame the British Government for holding out
hopes, for making definite pledges, to a young and struggling nation,
which they must have known they would not be able to redeem. He blamed
their action then, and he would blame it now, if the opportunity were
given to them to repeat it, for the opportunity would pass and the
pledge would pass into the happy hunting ground of unrealizable
politics, but not--and Mr Winter asked his listeners to mark this very
carefully--not until Canada was committed to such relations of trade
and taxes with the Imperial Government as would require the most heroic
efforts--it might run to a war--to extricate herself from. In plain
words, Mr Winter assured his country audiences, Great Britain had sold
them before, and she would sell them again. He stood there before them
as loyal to British connection as any man. He addressed a public as
loyal to British connection as any public. BUT--once bitten twice shy.

Horace Williams might riddle such arguments from end to end in the next
day’s Express, but if there is a thing that we enjoy in the country, it
is having the dodges of Government shown up with ignominy, and Mr Winter
found his account in this historic parallel.

Nothing could have been more serious in public than his line of defence
against the danger that menaced, but in friendly ears Mr Winter derided
it as a practical possibility, like the Liberals, Young and Windle.

“It seems to me,” he said, talking to Octavius Milburn, “that the
important thing at present is the party attitude to the disposition
of Crown lands and to Government-made railways. As for this racket
of Wallingham’s, it has about as much in it as an empty bun-bag. He’s
running round taking a lot of satisfaction blowing it out just now, and
the swells over there are clapping like anything, but the first knock
will show that it’s just a bun-bag, with a hole in it.”

“Folks in the old country are solid on the buns, though,” said Milburn
as they parted, and Alfred Hesketh, who was walking with his host,
said--“It’s bound in the end to get down to that, isn’t it?”

Presently Hesketh came back to it.

“Quaint idea, that--describing Wallingham’s policy as a bun-bag,” he
said, and laughed. “Winter is an amusing fellow.”

“Wallingham’s policy won’t even be a bun-bag much longer,” said Milburn.
“It won’t be anything at all. Imperial union is very nice to talk about,
but when you come down to hard fact it’s Australia for the Australians,
Canada for the Canadians, Africa for the Africans, every time.”

“Each for himself, and devil take the hindmost,” said Hesketh; “and when
the hindmost is England, as our friend Murchison declares it will be--”

“So much the worse for England,” said Milburn, amiably. “But we should
all be sorry to see it and, for my part, I don’t believe such a thing
is at all likely. And you may be certain of one thing,” he continued,
impressively: “No flag but the Union Jack will ever wave over Canada.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that!” Hesketh responded. “Since I have heard more of
your side of the question I am quite convinced that loyalty to England
and complete commercial independence--I might say even commercial
antagonism--may exist together in the colonies. It seems paradoxical,
but it is true.”

Mr Hesketh had naturally been hearing a good deal more of Mr Milburn’s
side of the question, staying as he was under Mr Milburn’s hospitable
roof. It had taken the least persuasion in the world to induce him to
make the Milburns a visit. He found them delightful people. He described
them in his letters home as the most typically Canadian family he had
met, quite simple and unconventional, but thoroughly warm-hearted, and
touchingly devoted to far-away England. Politically he could not see eye
to eye with Mr Milburn, but he could quite perceive Mr Milburn’s grounds
for the view he held. One thing, he explained to his correspondents, you
learned at once by visiting the colonies, and that was to make allowance
for local conditions, both social and economic.

He and Mr Milburn had long serious discussions, staying behind in the
dining-room to have them after tea, when the ladies took their fancy
work into the drawing-room, and Dora’s light touch was heard upon the
piano. It may be supposed that Hesketh brought every argument forward
in favour of the great departure that had been conceived in England; he
certainly succeeded in interesting his host very deeply in the English
point of view. He had, however, to encounter one that was made in
Canada--it resided in Mr Milburn as a stone might reside in a bag
of wool. Mr Milburn wouldn’t say that this preference trade idea, if
practicable, might not work out for the benefit of the Empire as a
whole. That was a thing he didn’t pretend to know. But it wouldn’t
work out for his benefit that was a thing he did know. When a man was
confronted with a big political change the question he naturally asked
himself was, “Is it going to be worth my while?” and he acted on the
answer to that question. He was able to explain to Hesketh, by a variety
of facts and figures, of fascinating interest to the inquiring mind,
just how and where such a concern as the Milburn Boiler Company would be
“hit” by the new policy, after which he asked his guest fairly, “Now,
if you were in my shoes, would you see your way to voting for any such
thing?”

“If I were in your shoes,” said Hesketh, thoughtfully, “I can’t say I
would.”

On grounds of sentiment, Octavius assured him, they were absolutely
at one, but in practical matters a man had to proceed on business
principles. He went about at this time expressing great esteem for
Hesketh’s capacity to assimilate facts. His opportunity to assimilate
them was not curtailed by any further demand for his services in the
South Fox campaign. He was as willing as ever, he told Lorne Murchison,
to enlist under the flag, and not for the first time; but Murchison and
Farquharson, and that lot, while grateful for the offer, seemed never
quite able to avail themselves of it: the fact was all the dates were
pretty well taken up. No doubt, Hesketh acknowledged, the work could be
done best by men familiar with the local conditions, but he could not
avoid the conviction that this attitude toward proffered help was very
like dangerous trifling. Possibly these circumstances gave him an
added impartiality for Mr Milburn’s facts. As the winter advanced his
enthusiasm for the country increased with his intelligent appreciation
of the possibilities of the Elgin boiler. The Elgin boiler was his
object-lesson in the development of the colonies; he paid, several
visits to the works to study it, and several times he thanked Mr Milburn
for the opportunity of familiarizing himself with such an important and
promising branch of Canadian industry.

“It looks,” said Octavius one evening in early February, “as if the
Grits were getting a little anxious about South Fox--high time, too.
I see Cruickshank is down to speak at Clayfield on the seventh, and
Tellier is to be here for the big meeting at the opera house on the
eleventh.”

“Tellier is Minister of Public Works, isn’t he?” asked Hesketh.

“Yes--and Cruickshank is an ex-Minister,” replied Mr Milburn. “Looks
pretty shaky when they’ve got to take men like that away from their work
in the middle of the session.”

“I shall be glad,” remarked his daughter Dora, “when this horrid
election is over. It spoils everything.”

She spoke a little fretfully. The election and the matters it involved
did interfere a good deal with her interest in life. As an occupation
it absorbed Lorne Murchison even more completely than she occasionally
desired; and as a topic it took up a larger share of the attention of Mr
Alfred Hesketh than she thought either reasonable or pleasing. Between
politics and boilers Miss Milburn almost felt at times that the world
held a second place for her.



CHAPTER XXVIII

The progress of Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Christie Cameron up the river
to Montreal, and so west to Elgin, was one series of surprises, most of
them pleasant and instructive to such a pair of intelligent Scotchwomen,
if we leave out the number of Roman Catholic churches that lift their
special symbol along the banks of the St Lawrence and the fact that Hugh
Finlay was not in Elgin to meet them upon their arrival. Dr Drummond, of
course, was there at the station to explain. Finlay had been obliged to
leave for Winnipeg only the day before, to attend a mission conference
in place of a delegate who had been suddenly laid aside by serious
illness. Finlay, he said, had been very loath to go, but there were many
reasons why it was imperative that he should; Dr Drummond explained them
all. “I insisted on it,” he assured them, frankly. “I told him I would
take the responsibility.”

He seemed very capable of taking it, both the ladies must have thought,
with his quick orders about the luggage and his waiting cab. Mrs
Kilbannon said so. “I’m sure,” she told him, “we are better off with you
than with Hugh. He was always a daft dependence at a railway station.”

They both--Mrs Kilbannon and Dr Drummond--looked out of the corners of
their eyes, so to speak, at Christie, the only one who might be expected
to show any sensitiveness; but Miss Cameron accepted the explanation
with readiness. Indeed, she said, she would have been real vexed if Mr
Finlay had stayed behind on her account--she showed herself well aware
of the importance of a nomination, and the desirability of responding to
it.

“It will just give me an opportunity of seeing the town,” she said,
looking at it through the cab windows as they drove; and Dr Drummond had
to admit that she seemed a sensible creature. Other things being
equal, Finlay might be doing very well for himself. As they talked of
Scotland--it transpired that Dr Drummond knew all the braes about Bross
as a boy--he found himself more than ever annoyed with Finlay about the
inequality of other things; and when they passed Knox Church and Miss
Cameron told him she hadn’t realized it was so imposing an edifice, he
felt downright sorry for the woman.

Dr Drummond had persuaded Finlay to go to Winnipeg with a vague hope
that something in the fortnight’s grace thus provided, might be
induced to happen. The form it oftenest took to his imagination was Miss
Christie’s announcement, when she set foot upon the station platform,
that she had become engaged, on the way over, to somebody else, some
fellow-traveller. Such things, Dr Drummond knew, did come about, usually
bringing distress and discomfiture in their train. Why, then, should
they not happen when all the consequences would be rejoiceful?

It was plain enough, however, that nothing of the kind had come to pass.
Miss Christie had arrived in Elgin, bringing her affections intact;
they might have been in any one of her portmanteaux. She had come with
definite calm intention, precisely in the guise in which she should have
been expected. At the very hour, in the very clothes, she was there.
Robust and pleasant, with a practical eye on her promising future, she
had arrived, the fulfilment of despair. Dr Drummond looked at her with
acquiescence, half-cowed, half-comic, wondering at his own folly in
dreaming of anything else. Miss Cameron brought the situation, as it
were, with her; it had to be faced, and Dr Drummond faced it like a
philosopher. She was the material necessity, the fact in the case, the
substantiation of her own legend; and Dr Drummond promptly gave her all
the consideration she demanded in this aspect. Already he heard himself
pronouncing a blessing over the pair--and they would make the best of
it. With characteristic dispatch he decided that the marriage should
take place the first Monday after Finlay’s return. That would give them
time to take a day or two in Toronto, perhaps, and get back for Finlay’s
Wednesday prayer meeting. “Or I could take it off his hands,” said Dr
Drummond to himself. “That would free them till the end of the week.”
 Solicitude increased in him that the best should be made of it; after
all, for a long time they had been making the worst. Mrs Forsyth, whom
it had been necessary to inform when Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Cameron
became actually imminent, saw plainly that the future Mrs Finlay
had made a very good impression on the Doctor; and as nature, in Mrs
Forsyth’s case, was more powerful than grace, she became critical
accordingly. Still, she was an honest soul: she found more fault with
what she called Miss Cameron’s “shirt-waists” than with Miss Cameron
herself, whom she didn’t doubt to be a good woman though she would
never see thirty-five again. Time and observation would no doubt mend or
remodel the shirt-waists; and meanwhile both they and Miss Cameron
would do very well for East Elgin, Mrs Forsyth avowed. Mrs Kilbannon,
definitely given over to caps and curls as they still wear them in
Bross, Mrs Forsyth at once formed a great opinion of. She might be
something, Mrs Forsyth thought, out of a novel by Mr Crockett, and made
you long to go to Scotland, where presumably everyone was like her. On
the whole the ladies from Bross profited rather than lost by the new
frame they stepped into in the house of Dr Drummond, of Elgin, Ontario.
Their special virtues, of dignity and solidity and frugality, stood out
saliently against the ease and unconstraint about them; in the profusion
of the table it was little less than edifying to hear Mrs Kilbannon,
invited to preserves, say, “Thank you, I have butter.” It was the
pleasantest spectacle, happily common enough, of the world’s greatest
inheritance. We see it in immigrants of all degrees, and we may perceive
it in Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. They come in couples and in
companies from those little imperial islands, bringing the crusted
qualities of the old blood bottled there so long, and sink with grateful
absorption into the wide bountiful stretches of the further countries.
They have much to take, but they give themselves; and so it comes about
that the Empire is summed up in the race, and the flag flies for its
ideals.

Mrs Forsyth had been told of the approaching event; but neither Dr
Drummond, who was not fond of making communications he did not approve
of, nor the Murchisons, who were shy of the matter as a queer business
which Advena seemed too much mixed up with, had mentioned it to anyone
else. Finlay himself had no intimates, and moved into his new house in
River Street under little comment. His doings excited small surprise,
because the town knew too little about him to expect him to do one
thing more than another. He was very significant among his people, very
important in their lives but not, somehow, at any expense to his private
self. He knew them, but they did not know him; and it is high praise of
him that this was no grievance among them. They would tell you without
resentment that the minister was a “very reserved” man; there might
be even a touch of proper pride in it. The worshippers of Knox Church
mission were rather a reserved lot themselves. It was different with the
Methodists; plenty of expansion there.

Elgin, therefore, knew nothing, beyond the fact that Dr Drummond had
two ladies from the old country staying with him, about whom particular
curiosity would hardly be expected outside of Knox Church. In view of
Finlay’s absence, Dr Drummond, consulting with Mrs Kilbannon, decided
that for the present Elgin need not be further informed. There was no
need, they agreed, to give people occasion to talk; and it would just be
a nuisance to have to make so many explanations. Both Mrs Kilbannon and
her niece belonged to the race that takes great satisfaction in keeping
its own counsel. Their situation gained for them the further interest
that nothing need be said about it; and the added importance of caution
was plainly to be discerned in their bearing, even toward one another.
It was a portentous business, this of marrying a minister, under the
most ordinary circumstances, not to be lightly dealt with, and even
more of an undertaking in a far new country where the very wind blew
differently, and the extraordinary freedom of conversation made it more
than ever necessary to take heed to what you were saying. So far as Miss
Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon were aware, the matter had not been “spoken
of” elsewhere at all. Dr Drummond, remembering Advena Murchison’s
acquaintance with it, had felt the weight of a complication, and had
discreetly held his tongue. Mrs Kilbannon approved her nephew in
this connection. “Hugh,” she said, “was never one to let on more than
necessary.” It was a fine secret between Hugh, in Winnipeg, whence
he had written all that was lawful or desirable, and themselves at Dr
Drummond’s. Miss Cameron said it would give her more freedom to look
about her.

In the midst of all this security, and on the very first day after their
arrival, it was disconcerting to be told that a lady, whose name
they had never heard before, had called to see Miss Cameron and Mrs
Kilbannon. They had not even appeared at church, as they told one
another with dubious glances. They had no reason whatever to expect
visitors. Dr Drummond was in the cemetery burying a member; Mrs Forsyth
was also abroad. “Now who in the world,” asked Mrs Kilbannon of Miss
Cameron, “is Miss Murchison?”

“They come to our church,” said Sarah, in the door. “They’ve got the
foundry. It’s the oldest one. She teaches.”

Sarah in the door was even more disconcerting than an unexpected
visitor. Sarah invariably took them off their guard, in the door or
anywhere. She freely invited their criticism, but they would not have
known how to mend her. They looked at her now helplessly, and Mrs
Kilbannon said, “Very well. We will be down directly.”

“It may be just some friendly body,” she said, as they descended the
stairs together, “or it may be common curiosity. In that case we’ll
disappoint it.”

Whatever they expected, therefore, it was not Advena. It was not a tall
young woman with expressive eyes, a manner which was at once abrupt and
easy, and rather a lounging way of occupying the corner of a sofa. “When
she sat down,” as Mrs Kilbannon said afterward, “she seemed to untie and
fling herself as you might a parcel.” Neither Mrs Kilbannon nor Christie
Cameron could possibly be untied or flung, so perhaps they gave this
capacity in Advena more importance than it had. But it was only a part
of what was to them a new human demonstration, something to inspect very
carefully and accept very cautiously--the product, like themselves, yet
so suspiciously different, of these free airs and these astonishingly
large ideas. In some ways, as she sat there in her graceful dress and
careless attitude, asking them direct smiling questions about their
voyage, she imposed herself as of the class whom both these ladies of
Bross would acknowledge unquestioningly to be “above” them; in others
she seemed to be of no class at all; so far she came short of small
standards of speech and behaviour. The ladies from Bross, more and more
confused, grew more and more reticent, when suddenly, out of a simple
remark of Miss Cameron’s about missing in the train the hot-water cans
they gave you “to your feet” in Scotland, reticence descended upon Miss
Murchison also. She sat in an odd silence, looking at Miss Cameron,
absorbed apparently in the need of looking at her, finding nothing to
say, her flow of pleasant inquiry dried up, and all her soul at work,
instead, to perceive the woman. Mrs Kilbannon was beginning to think
better of her--it was so much more natural to be a little backward with
strangers--when the moment passed. Their visitor drew herself out of it
with almost a perceptible effort, and seemed to glance consideringly
at them in their aloofness, their incommunicativeness, their plain odds
with her. I don’t know what she expected; but we may assume that she was
there simply to offer herself up, and the impulse of sacrifice seldom
considers whether or not it may be understood. It was to her a normal,
natural thing that a friend of Hugh Finlay’s should bring an early
welcome to his bride; and to do the normal, natural thing at keen
personal cost was to sound that depth, or rise to that height of the
spirit where pain sustains. We know of Advena that she was prone to
this form of exaltation. Those who feel themselves capable may pronounce
whether she would have been better at home crying in her bedroom.

She decided badly--how could she decide well?--on what she would say to
explain herself.

“I am so sorry,” she told them, “that Mr Finlay is obliged to be away.”

It was quite wrong; it assumed too much, her knowledge and their
confidence, and the propriety of discussing Mr Finlay’s absence. There
was even an unconscious hint of another kind of assumption in it--a
suggestion of apology for Mr Finlay. Advena was aware of it even as it
left her lips, and the perception covered her with a damning blush. She
had a sudden terrified misgiving that her role was too high for her,
that she had already cracked her mask. But she looked quietly at Miss
Cameron and smiled across the tide that surged in her as she added, “He
was very distressed at having to go.”

They looked at her in an instant’s blank astonishment. Miss Cameron
opened her lips and closed them again, glancing at Mrs Kilbannon. They
fell back together, but not in disorder. This was something much more
formidable than common curiosity. Just what it was they would consider
later; meanwhile Mrs Kilbannon responded with what she would have called
cool civility.

“Perhaps you have heard that Mr Finlay is my nephew?” she said.

“Indeed I have. Mr Finlay has told me a great deal about you, Mrs
Kilbannon, and about his life at Bross,” Advena replied. “And he has
told me about you, too,” she went on, turning to Christie Cameron.

“Indeed?” said she.

“Oh, a long time ago. He has been looking forward to your arrival for
some months, hasn’t he?”

“We took our passages in December,” said Miss Cameron.

“And you are to be married almost immediately, are you not?” Miss
Murchison continued, pleasantly.

Mrs Kilbannon had an inspiration. “Could he by any means have had the
banns cried?” she demanded of Christie, who looked piercingly at their
visitor for the answer.

“Oh, no,” Advena laughed softly. “Presbyterians haven’t that custom over
here--does it still exist anywhere? Mr Finlay told me himself.”

“Has he informed all his acquaintances?” asked Mrs Kilbannon. “We
thought maybe his elders would be expecting to hear, or his Board of
Management. Or he might have just dropped a word to his Sessions Clerk.
But--”

Advena shook her head. “I think it unlikely,” she said.

“Then why would he be telling you?” inquired the elder lady, bluntly.

“He told me, I suppose, because I have the honour to be a friend of
his,” Advena said, smiling. “But he is not a man, is he, who makes many
friends? It is possible, I dare say, that he has mentioned it to no one
else.”

Poor Advena! She had indeed uttered her ideal to unsympathetic
ears--brought her pig, as her father would have said, to the wrong
market. She sat before the ladies from Bross, Hugh Finlay’s only
confidante. She sat handsome and upheld and not altogether penetrable, a
kind of gipsy to their understanding, though indeed the Romany strain in
her was beyond any divining of theirs. They, on their part, reposed in
their clothes with all their bristles out--what else could have been
expected of them?--convinced in their own minds that they had come not
only to a growing but to a forward country.

Mrs Kilbannon was perhaps a little severe. “I wonder that we have not
heard of you, Miss Murchison,” said she, “but we are happy to make the
acquaintance of any of my nephew’s friends. You will have heard him
preach, perhaps?”

“Often,” said Advena, rising. “We have no one here who can compare with
him in preaching. There was very little reason why you should have heard
of me. I am--of no importance.” She hesitated and fought for an instant
with a trembling of the lip. “But now that you have been persuaded to be
a part of our life here,” she said to Christie, “I thought I would
like to come and offer you my friendship because it is his already. I
hope--so much--that you will be happy here. It is a nice little place.
And I want you to let me help you--about your house, and in every way
that is possible. I am sure I can be of use.” She paused and looked at
their still half-hostile faces. “I hope,” she faltered, “you don’t mind
my--having come?”

“Not at all,” said Christie, and Mrs Kilbannon added, “I’m sure you mean
it very kindly.”

A flash of the comedy of it shot up in Advena’s eyes. “Yes,” she said,
“I do. Good-bye.”

If they had followed her departure they would have been further
confounded to see her walk not quite steadily away; shaken with
fantastic laughter. They looked instead at one another, as if to find
the solution of the mystery where indeed it lay, in themselves.

“She doesn’t even belong to his congregation,” said Christie. “Just a
friend, she said.”

“I expect the friendship’s mostly upon her side,” remarked Mrs
Kilbannon. “She seemed frank enough about it. But I would see no
necessity for encouraging her friendship on my own account, if I were in
your place, Christie.”

“I think I’ll manage without it,” said Christie.



CHAPTER XXIX

The South Fox fight was almost over. Three days only remained before the
polling booths would be open, and the voters of the towns of Elgin and
Clayfield and the surrounding townships would once again be invited to
make their choice between a Liberal and a Conservative representative of
the district in the Dominion House of Commons. The ground had never been
more completely covered, every inch of advantage more stubbornly held,
by either side, in the political history of the riding. There was no
doubt of the hope that sat behind the deprecation in Walter Winter’s
eye, nor of the anxiety that showed through the confidence freely
expressed by the Liberal leaders. The issue would be no foregone
conclusion, as it had been practically any time within the last eleven
years; and as Horace Williams remarked to the select lot that met pretty
frequently at the Express office for consultation and rally, they had
“no use for any sort of carelessness.”

It was undeniably felt that the new idea, the great idea whose putative
fatherhood in Canada certainly lay at the door of the Liberal party,
had drawn in fewer supporters than might have been expected. In England
Wallingham, wearing it like a medal, seemed to be courting political
excommunication with it, except that Wallingham was so hard to
effectively curse. The ex-Minister deserved, clearly, any ban that could
be put upon him. No sort of remonstrance could hold him from going
about openly and persistently exhorting people to “think imperially,” a
liberty which, as is well known, the Holy Cobdenite Church, supreme in
those islands, expressly forbids. Wallingham appeared to think that
by teaching and explaining he could help his fellow-islanders to see
further than the length of their fists, and exorcise from them
the spirit, only a century and a quarter older and a trifle more
sophisticated, that lost them the American colonies. But so far little
had transpired to show that Wallingham was stronger than nature and
destiny. There had been Wallingham meetings of remarkable enthusiasm;
his supporters called them epoch-making, as if epochs were made of
cheers. But the workingman of Great Britain was declaring stolidly in
the by-elections against any favour to colonial produce at his expense,
thereby showing himself one of those humble instruments that Providence
uses for the downfall of arrogant empires. It will be thus, no doubt,
that the workingman will explain in the future his eminent usefulness
to the government of his country, and it will be in these terms that
the cost of educating him by means of the ballot will be demonstrated.
Meanwhile we may look on and cultivate philosophy; or we may make war
upon the gods with Mr Wallingham which is, perhaps, the better part.

That, to turn from recrimination, was what they saw in Canada looking
across--the queerest thing of all was the recalcitrance of the farm
labourer; they could only stare at that--and it may be that the
spectacle was depressing to hopeful initiative. At all events, it was
plain that the new policy was suffering from a certain flatness on the
further side. As a ballon d’essai it lacked buoyancy; and no doubt
Mr Farquharson was right in declaring that above all things it lacked
actuality, business--the proposition, in good set terms, for men to turn
over, to accept or reject. Nothing could be done with it, Mr Farquharson
averred, as a mere prospect; it was useful only to its enemies. We of
the young countries must be invited to deeds, not theories, of which we
have a restless impatience; and this particular theory, though of golden
promise, was beginning to recoil to some extent, upon the cause which
had been confident enough to adopt it before it could be translated into
action and its hard equivalent. The Elgin Mercury probably overstated
the matter when it said that the Grits were dead sick of the preference
they would never get; but Horace Williams was quite within the mark
when he advised Lorne to stick to old Reform principles--clean
administration, generous railway policy, sympathetic labour legislation,
and freeze himself a little on imperial love and attachment.

“They’re not so sweet on it in Ottawa as they were, by a long chalk,”
 he said. “Look at the Premier’s speech to the Chambers of Commerce
in Montreal. Pretty plain statement that, of a few things the British
Government needn’t expect.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lorne. “He was talking to manufacturers, you
know, a pretty skittish lot anywhere. It sounded independent, but if you
look into it you won’t find it gave the cause away any.”

“The old man’s got to think of Quebec, where his fat little majority
lives,” remarked Bingham, chairman of the most difficult subdivision in
the town. “The Premier of this country drives a team, you know.”

“Yes,” said Lorne, “but he drives it tandem, and Johnny Francois is the
second horse.”

“Maybe so,” returned Mr Williams, “but the organ’s singing pretty small,
too. Look at this.” He picked up the Dominion from the office table and
read aloud: “‘If Great Britain wishes to do a deal with the colonies
she will find them willing to meet her in a spirit of fairness and
enthusiasm. But it is for her to decide, and Canada would be the last
to force her bread down the throat of the British labourer at a higher
price than he can afford to pay for it.’ What’s that, my boy? Is it
high-mindedness? No, sir, it’s lukewarmness.”

“The Dominion makes me sick,” said young Murchison. “It’s so scared of
the Tory source of the scheme in England that it’s handing the whole
boom of the biggest chance this country ever had over to the Tories
here. If anything will help us to lose it that will. No Conservative
Government in Canada can put through a cent of preference on English
goods when it comes to the touch, and they know it. They’re full of
loyalty just now--baying the moon--but if anybody opens a window they’ll
turn tail fast enough.”

“I guess the Dominion knows it, too,” said Mr Williams. “When Great
Britain is quite sure she’s ready to do business on preference lines
it’s the Liberal party on this side she’ll have to talk to. No use
showing ourselves too anxious, you know. Besides, it might do harm over
there. We’re all right; we’re on record. Wallingham knows as well as we
do the lines we’re open on--he’s heard them from Canadian Liberals more
than once. When they get good and ready they can let us know.”

“Jolly them up with it at your meetings by all means,” advised Bingham,
“but use it as a kind of superfluous taffy; don’t make it your main
lay-out.”

The Reform Association of South Fox had no more energetic officer than
Bingham, though as he sat on the edge of the editorial table chewing
portions of the margin of that afternoon’s Express, and drawling out
maxims to the Liberal candidate, you might not have thought so. He was
explaining that he had been in this business for years, and had never
had a job that gave him so much trouble.

“We’ll win out,” he said, “but the canvass isn’t any Christmas joy--not
this time. There’s Jim Whelan,” he told them. “We all know what Jim
is--a Tory from way back, where they make ‘em so they last, and a soaker
from way back, too; one day on his job and two days sleepin’ off his
whiskey. Now we don’t need Jim Whelan’s vote, never did need it, but
the boys have generally been able to see that one of those two days was
election day. There’s no necessity for Jim’s putting in his paper--a
character like that--no necessity at all--he’d much better be
comfortable in bed. This time, I’m darned if the old boozer hasn’t sworn
off! Tells the boys he’s on to their game, and there’s no liquor in this
town that’s good enough to get him to lose his vote--wouldn’t get drunk
on champagne. He’s held out for ten days already, and it looks like
Winter’d take his cross all right on Thursday.”

“I guess I’d let him have it, Bingham,” said Lorne Murchison with a kind
of tolerant deprecation, void of offence, the only manner in which
he knew how to convey disapproval to the older man. “The boys in your
division are a pretty tough lot, anyhow. We don’t want the other side
getting hold of any monkey tricks.”

“It’s necessary to win this election, young man,” said Bingham,
“lawfully. You won’t have any trouble with my bunch.”

It was not, as will be imagined, the first discussion, so late in
the day, of the value of the preference trade argument to the Liberal
campaign. They had all realized, after the first few weeks, that their
young candidate was a trifle overbitten with it, though remonstrance
had been a good deal curbed by Murchison’s treatment of it. When he
had brought it forward at the late fall fairs and in the lonely country
schoolhouses, his talk had been so trenchant, so vivid and pictorial,
that the gathered farmers listened with open mouths, like children,
pathetically used with life, to a grown-up fairy tale. As Horace
Williams said, if a dead horse could be made to go this one would have
brought Murchison romping in. And Lorne had taken heed to the counsel of
his party leaders. At joint meetings, which offered the enemy his best
opportunity for travesty and derision, he had left it in the background
of debate, devoting himself to arguments of more immediate utility. In
the literature of the campaign it glowed with prospective benefit, but
vaguely, like a halo of Liberal conception and possible achievement,
waiting for the word from overseas. The Express still approved it, but
not in headlines, and wished the fact to be widely understood that while
the imperial idea was a very big idea, the Liberals of South Fox were
going to win this election without any assistance from it.

Lorne submitted. After all, victory was the thing. There could be no
conquest for the idea without the party triumph first. He submitted,
but his heart rebelled. He looked over the subdivisional reports with
Williams and Farquharson, and gave ear to their warning interpretations;
but his heart was an optimist, and turned always to the splendid
projection upon the future that was so incomparably the title to success
of those who would unite to further it. His mind accepted the old
working formulas for dealing with an average electorate, but to his
eager apprehending heart it seemed unbelievable that the great imperial
possibility, the dramatic chance for the race that hung even now, in
the history of the world, between the rising and the setting of the sun,
should fail to be perceived and acknowledged as the paramount issue, the
contingency which made the by-election of South Fox an extraordinary and
momentous affair. He believed in the Idea; he saw it, with Wallingham,
not only a glorious prospect, but an educative force; and never had he
a moment of such despondency that it confounded him upon his horizon in
the faded colours of some old Elizabethan mirage.

The opera house, the night of Mr Murchison’s final address to the
electors of South Fox, was packed from floor to ceiling, and a large
and patient overflow made the best of the hearing accommodation of the
corridors and the foyer. A Minister was to speak, Sir Matthew Tellier,
who held the portfolio of Public Works; and for drawing a crowd in Elgin
there was nothing to compare with a member of the Government. He was
the sum of all ambition and the centre of all importance; he was held
to have achieved in the loftiest sense, and probably because he deserved
to; a kind of afflatus sat upon him. They paid him real deference and
they flocked to hear him. Cruickshank was a second attraction; and
Lorne himself, even at this stage of the proceedings, “drew” without
abatement. They knew young Murchison well enough; he had gone in and out
among them all his life; yet since he had come before them in this new
capacity a curious interest had gathered about him. People looked at him
as if he had developed something they did not understand, and perhaps
he had; he was in touch with the Idea. They listened with an intense
personal interest in him which, no doubt, went to obscure what he
said: perhaps a less absorbing personality would have carried the Idea
further. However, they did look and listen--that was the main point, and
on their last opportunity they were in the opera house in great numbers.

Lorne faced them with an enviable security; the friendliness of the
meeting was in the air. The gathering was almost entirely of one
political complexion: the Conservatives of the town would have been glad
enough to turn out to hear Minister Tellier; but the Liberals were of no
mind to gratify them at the cost of having to stand themselves, and were
on hand early to assert a prior moral claim to chairs. In the seated
throng Lorne could pick out the fine head of his father, and his
mother’s face, bright with anticipation, beside. Advena was there,
too, and Stella; and the boys would have a perch, not too conspicuous,
somewhere in the gallery. Dr Drummond was in the second row, and a
couple of strange ladies with him: he was chuckling with uncommon
humour at some remark of the younger one when Lorne noted him. Old Sandy
MacQuhot was in a good place; had been since six o’clock, and Peter
Macfarlane, too, for that matter, though Peter sat away back as beseemed
a modest functionary whose business was with the book and the bell.
Altogether, as Horace Williams leaned over to tell him, it was like a
Knox Church sociable--he could feel completely at home; and though the
audience was by no means confined to Knox Church, Lorne did feel at
home. Dora Milburn’s countenance he might perhaps have missed, but Dora
was absent by arrangement. Mr Milburn, as the fight went on, had shown
himself so increasingly bitter, to the point of writing letters in the
Mercury attacking Wallingham and the Liberal leaders of South Fox, that
his daughter felt an insurmountable delicacy in attending even Lorne’s
“big meeting.” Alfred Hesketh meant to have gone, but it was ten by the
Milburns’ drawing-room clock before he remembered. Miss Filkin actually
did go, and brought home a great report of it. Miss Filkin would no more
have missed a Minister than she would a bishop; but she was the only
one.

Lorne had prepared for this occasion for a long time. It was certain
to come, the day of the supreme effort, when he should make his final
appeal under the most favourable circumstances that could be devised,
when the harassing work of the campaign would be behind him, and nothing
would remain but the luxury of one last strenuous call to arms. The
glory of that anticipation had been with him from the beginning; and in
the beginning he saw his great moment only in one character. For weeks,
while he plodded through the details of the benefits South Fox had
received and might expect to receive at the hands of the Liberal party,
he privately stored argument on argument, piled phrase on phrase, still
further to advance and defend the imperial unity of his vision on this
certain and special opportunity. His jihad it would be, for the faith
and purpose of his race; so he scanned it and heard it, with conviction
hot in him, and impulse strong, and intention noble. Then uneasiness had
arisen, as we know; and under steady pressure he had daily drawn himself
from these high intentions, persuaded by Bingham and the rest that
they were not yet “in shape” to talk about. So that his address on this
memorable evening would have a different stamp from the one he designed
in the early burning hours of his candidature. He had postponed
those matters, under advice, to the hour of practical dealing, when a
Government which it would be his privilege to support would consider and
carry them. He put the notes of his original speech away in his office
desk with solicitude--it was indeed very thorough, a grand marshalling
of the facts and review of the principles involved--and pigeonholed
it in the chambers of his mind, with the good hope to bring it forth
another day. Then he devoted his attention to the history of Liberalism
in Fox County--both ridings were solid--and it was upon the history of
Liberalism in Fox County, its triumphs and its fruits, that he embarked
so easily and so assuredly, when he opened his address in the opera
house that Tuesday night.

Who knows at what suggestion, or even precisely at what moment,
the fabric of his sincere intention fell away? Bingham does not; Mr
Farquharson has the vaguest idea; Dr Drummond declares that he expected
it from the beginning, but is totally unable to say why. I can get
nothing more out of them, though they were all there, though they all
saw him, indeed a dramatic figure, standing for the youth and energy
of the old blood, and heard him, as he slipped away into his great
preoccupation, as he made what Bingham called his “bad break.” His
very confidence may have accounted for it; he was off guard against the
enemy, and the more completely off guard against himself. The history
of Liberalism in Fox County offered, no doubt, some inlet to the rush
of the Idea; for suddenly, Mr Farquharson says, he was “off.” Mr
Farquharson was on the platform, and “I can tell you,” said he, “I
pricked up my ears.” They all did; the Idea came in upon such a personal
note.

“I claim it my great good fortune,” the young man was suddenly telling
them, in a note of curious gravity and concentration, “and however the
fight goes, I shall always claim it my great good fortune to have been
identified, at a critical moment, with the political principles that are
ennobled in this country by the imperialistic aim. An intention, a great
purpose in the endless construction and reconstruction of the world,
will choose its own agency; and the imperial design in Canada has chosen
the Liberal party, because the Liberal party in this country is the
party of the soil, the land, the nation as it springs from that which
makes it a nation; and imperialism is intensely and supremely a national
affair. Ours is the policy of the fields. We stand for the wheat-belt
and the stockyard, the forest and the mine, as the basic interests of
the country. We stand for the principles that make for nation-building
by the slow sweet processes of the earth, cultivating the individual
rooted man who draws his essence and his tissues from the soil and so,
by unhurried, natural, healthy growth, labour sweating his vices out
of him, forms the character of the commonwealth, the foundation of the
State. So the imperial idea seeks its Canadian home in Liberal councils.
The imperial idea is far-sighted. England has outlived her own body.
Apart from her heart and her history, England is an area where certain
trades are carried on--still carried on. In the scrolls of the future it
is already written that the centre of the Empire must shift--and where,
if not to Canada?”

There was a half-comprehending burst of applause, Dr Drummond’s the
first clap. It was a curious change from the simple colloquial manner
in which young Murchison had begun and to which the audience were
accustomed; and on this account probably they stamped the harder.
They applauded Lorne himself; something from him infected them; they
applauded being made to feel like that. They would clap first and
consider afterward. John Murchison smiled with pleasure, but shook his
head. Bingham, doubled up and clapping like a repeating rifle, groaned
aloud under cover of it to Horace Williams: “Oh, the darned kid!”

“A certain Liberal peer of blessed political memory,” Lorne continued,
with a humorous twist of his mouth, “on one of those graceful, elegant,
academic occasions which offer political peers such happy opportunities
of getting in their work over there, had lately a vision which he
described to his university audience of what might have happened if the
American colonies had remained faithful to Great Britain--a vision of
monarch and Ministers, Government and Parliament, departing solemnly
for the other hemisphere. They did not so remain; so the noble peer may
conjure up his vision or dismiss his nightmare as he chooses; and it is
safe to prophesy that no port of the United States will see that entry.
But, remembering that the greater half of the continent did remain
faithful, the northern and strenuous half, destined to move with sure
steps and steady mind to greater growth and higher place among the
nations than any of us can now imagine--would it be as safe to
prophesy that such a momentous sailing-day will never be more than the
after-dinner fantasy of aristocratic rhetoric? Is it not at least as
easy to imagine that even now, while the people of England send their
viceroys to the ends of the earth, and vote careless millions for a
reconstructed army, and sit in the wrecks of Cabinets disputing whether
they will eat our bread or the stranger’s, the sails may be filling,
in the far harbour of time which will bear their descendants to a
representative share of the duties and responsibilities of Empire in the
capital of the Dominion of Canada?”

It was the boldest proposition, and the Liberal voters of the town of
Elgin blinked a little, looking at it. Still they applauded, hurriedly,
to get it over and hear what more might be coming. Bingham, on the
platform, laughed heartily and conspicuously, as if anybody could see
that it was all an excellent joke. Lorne half-turned to him with a
gesture of protest. Then he went on--

“If that transport ever left the shores of England we would go far, some
of us, to meet it; but for all the purposes that matter most it sailed
long ago. British statesmen could bring us nothing better than the
ideals of British government; and those we have had since we levied our
first tax and made our first law. That precious cargo was our heritage,
and we never threw it overboard, but chose rather to render what impost
it brought; and there are those who say that the impost has been heavy,
though never a dollar was paid.”

He paused for an instant and seemed to review and take account of what
he had said. He was hopelessly adrift from the subject he had proposed
to himself, launched for better or for worse upon the theme that was
subliminal in him and had flowed up, on which he was launched, and
almost rudderless, without construction and without control. The speech
of his first intention, orderly, developed, was as far from him as the
history of Liberalism in Fox County. For an instant he hesitated; and
then, under the suggestion, no doubt, of that ancient misbehaviour in
Boston Harbour at which he had hinted, he took up another argument. I
will quote him a little.

“Let us hold,” he said simply, “to the Empire. Let us keep this
patrimony that has been ours for three hundred years. Let us not
forget the flag. We believe ourselves, at this moment, in no danger of
forgetting it. The day after Paardeburg, that still winter day, did
not our hearts rise within us to see it shaken out with its message
everywhere, shaken out against the snow? How it spoke to us, and lifted
us, the silent flag in the new fallen snow! Theirs--and ours... That was
but a little while ago, and there is not a man here who will not bear me
out in saying that we were never more loyal, in word and deed, than we
are now. And that very state of things has created for us an undermining
alternative...

“So long as no force appeared to improve the trade relations between
England and this country Canada sought in vain to make commercial
bargains with the United States. They would have none of us or our
produce; they kept their wall just as high against us as against the
rest of the world: not a pine plank or a bushel of barley could we get
over under a reciprocal arrangement. But the imperial trade idea has
changed the attitude of our friends to the south. They have small
liking for any scheme which will improve trade between Great Britain and
Canada, because trade between Great Britain and Canada must be improved
at their expense. And now you cannot take up an American paper without
finding the report of some commercial association demanding closer trade
relations with Canada, or an American magazine in which some far-sighted
economist is not urging the same thing. They see us thinking about
keeping the business in the family; with that hard American common sense
that has made them what they are, they accept the situation; and at this
moment they are ready to offer us better terms to keep our trade.”

Bingham, Horace Williams, and Mr Farquharson applauded loudly. Their
young man frowned a little and squared his chin. He was past hints of
that kind.

“And that,” he went on to say, “is, on the surface, a very satisfactory
state of things. No doubt a bargain between the Americans and ourselves
could be devised which would be a very good bargain on both sides. In
the absence of certain pressing family affairs, it might be as well
worth our consideration as we used to think it before we were invited
to the family council. But if anyone imagines that any degree of
reciprocity with the United States could be entered upon without killing
the idea of British preference trade for all time, let him consider what
Canada’s attitude toward that idea would be today if the Americans had
consented to our proposals twenty-five years ago, and we were invited to
make an imperial sacrifice of the American trade that had prospered, as
it would have prospered, for a quarter of a century! I doubt whether the
proposition would even be made to us...

“But the alternative before Canada is not a mere choice of markets; we
are confronted with a much graver issue. In this matter of dealing
with our neighbour our very existence is involved. If we would preserve
ourselves as a nation, it has become our business, not only to reject
American overtures in favour of the overtures of our own great England,
but to keenly watch and actively resist American influence, as it
already threatens us through the common channels of life and energy. We
often say that we fear no invasion from the south, but the armies of
the south have already crossed the border. American enterprise, American
capital, is taking rapid possession of our mines and our water power,
our oil areas and our timber limits. In today’s Dominion, one paper
alone, you may read of charters granted to five industrial concerns
with headquarters in the United States. The trades unions of the two
countries are already international. American settlers are pouring into
the wheat-belt of the Northwest, and when the Dominion of Canada has
paid the hundred million dollars she has just voted for a railway to
open up the great lone northern lands between Quebec and the Pacific,
it will be the American farmer and the American capitalist who will
reap the benefit. They approach us today with all the arts of peace,
commercial missionaries to the ungathered harvests of neglected
territories; but the day may come when they will menace our coasts to
protect their markets--unless, by firm, resolved, whole-hearted action
now, we keep our opportunities for our own people.”

They cheered him promptly, and a gathered intensity came into his face
at the note of praise.

“Nothing on earth can hold him now,” said Bingham, as he crossed his
arms upon a breast seething with practical politics, and waited for the
worst.

“The question of the hour for us,” said Lorne Murchison to his
fellow-townsmen, curbing the strenuous note in his voice, “is deeper
than any balance of trade can indicate, wider than any department of
statistics can prove. We cannot calculate it in terms of pig-iron, or
reduce it to any formula of consumption. The question that underlies
this decision for Canada is that of the whole stamp and character of
her future existence. Is that stamp and character to be impressed by the
American Republic effacing”--he smiled a little--“the old Queen’s head
and the new King’s oath? Or is it to be our own stamp and character,
acquired in the rugged discipline of our colonial youth, and developed
in the national usage of the British Empire?”...

Dr Drummond clapped alone; everybody else was listening.

“It is ours,” he told them, “in this greater half of the continent, to
evolve a nobler ideal. The Americans from the beginning went in a spirit
of revolt; the seed of disaffection was in every Puritan bosom. We from
the beginning went in a spirit of amity, forgetting nothing, disavowing
nothing, to plant the flag with our fortunes. We took our very
Constitution, our very chart of national life, from England--her laws,
her liberty, her equity were good enough for us. We have lived by them,
some of us have died by them...and, thank God, we were long poor...

“And this Republic,” he went on hotly, “this Republic that menaces our
national life with commercial extinction, what past has she that is
comparable? The daughter who left the old stock to be the light woman
among nations, welcoming all comers, mingling her pure blood, polluting
her lofty ideals until it is hard indeed to recognize the features and
the aims of her honourable youth...”

Allowance will be made for the intemperance of his figure. He believed
himself, you see, at the bar for the life of a nation.

“...Let us not hesitate to announce ourselves for the Empire, to throw
all we are and all we have into the balance for that great decision.
The seers of political economy tell us that if the stars continue to
be propitious, it is certain that a day will come which will usher in
a union of the Anglo-Saxon nations of the world. As between England and
the United States the predominant partner in that firm will be the one
that brings Canada. So that the imperial movement of the hour may mean
even more than the future of the motherland, may reach even farther than
the boundaries of Great Britain...”

Again he paused, and his eye ranged over their listening faces. He had
them all with him, his words were vivid in their minds; the truth of
them stood about him like an atmosphere. Even Bingham looked at him
without reproach. But he had done.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice dropping, with a hint of
tiredness, to another level, “I have the honour to stand for your
suffrages as candidate in the Liberal interest for the riding of South
Fox in the Dominion House of Commons the day after tomorrow. I solicit
your support, and I hereby pledge myself to justify it by every means in
my power. But it would be idle to disguise from you that while I attach
all importance to the immediate interests in charge of the Liberal
party, and if elected shall use my best efforts to further them, the
great task before that party, in my opinion, the overshadowing task to
which, I shall hope, in my place and degree to stand committed from
the beginning, is the one which I have endeavoured to bring before your
consideration this evening.”

They gave him a great appreciation, and Mr Cruickshank, following, spoke
in complimentary terms of the eloquent appeal made by the “young and
vigorous protagonist” of the imperial cause, but proceeded to a number
of quite other and apparently more important grounds why he should be
elected. The Hon. Mr Tellier’s speech--the Minister was always kept
to the last--was a defence of the recent dramatic development of the
Government’s railway policy, and a reminder of the generous treatment
Elgin was receiving in the Estimates for the following year--thirty
thousand dollars for a new Drill Hall, and fifteen thousand for
improvements to the post-office. It was a telling speech, with the
chink of hard cash in every sentence, a kind of audit by a chartered
accountant of the Liberal books of South Fox, showing good sound reason
why the Liberal candidate should be returned on Thursday, if only
to keep the balance right. The audience listened with practical
satisfaction. “That’s Tellier all over,” they said to one another...

The effect in committee of what, in spite of the Hon. Mr Tellier’s
participation, I must continue to call the speech of the evening, may
be gathered from a brief colloquy between Mr Bingham and Mr Williams, in
the act of separating at the door of the opera house.

“I don’t know what it was worth to preference trade,” said Bingham, “but
it wasn’t worth a hill o’ beans to his own election.”

“He had as soft a snap,” returned Horace Williams, on the brink of
tears--“as soft a snap as anybody ever had in this town. And he’s
monkeyed it all away. All away.”

Both the local papers published the speech in full the following day.
“If there’s anything in Manchester or Birmingham that Mr Lorne Murchison
would like,” commented the Mercury editorially, “we understand he has
only to call for it.”



CHAPTER XXX

The Milburns’ doorbell rang very early the morning of the election.
The family and Alfred Hesketh were just sitting down to breakfast. Mr
Hesketh was again the guest of the house. He had taken a run out to
Vancouver with Mr Milburn’s partner, who had gone to settle a point or
two in connection with the establishment of a branch there. The points
had been settled and Hesketh, having learned more than ever, had
returned to Elgin.

The maid came back into the room with a conscious air, and said
something in a low voice to Dora, who flushed and frowned a little,
and asked to be excused. As she left the room a glance of intelligence
passed between her and her mother. While Miss Milburn was generally
thought to be “most like” her father both in appearance and disposition,
there were points upon which she could count on an excellent
understanding with her other parent.

“Oh, Lorne,” she said, having carefully closed the drawing-room door,
“what in the world have you come here for? Today of all days! Did
anybody see you?”

The young man, standing tall and broad-shouldered before the
mantelpiece, had yet a look of expecting reproach.

“I don’t know,” he said humbly.

“I don’t think Father would like it,” Dora told him, “if he knew you
were here. Why, we’re having an early breakfast on purpose to let
him get out and work for Winter. I never saw him so excited over an
election. To think of your coming today!”

He made a step toward her. “I came because it is today,” he said. “Only
for a minute, dear. It’s a great day for me, you know--whether we win or
lose. I wanted you to be in it. I wanted you to wish me good luck.”

“But you know I always do,” she objected.

“Yes, I know. But a fellow likes to hear it, Dora--on the day, you know.
And I’ve seen so little of you lately.”

She looked at him measuringly. “You’re looking awfully thin,” she
exclaimed, with sudden compunction. “I wish you had never gone into this
horrid campaign. I wish they had nominated somebody else.”

Lorne smiled half-bitterly. “I shouldn’t wonder if a few other people
wished the same thing,” he said. “But I’m afraid they’ll have to make
the best of it now.”

Dora had not sanctioned his visit by sitting down; and as he came nearer
to her she drew a step away, moving by instinct from the capture of the
lover. But he had made little of that, and almost as he spoke was at her
side. She had to yield her hands to him.

“Well, you’ll win it for them if anybody could,” she assured him.

“Say ‘win it for us,’ dear.”

She shook her head. “I’m not a Liberal--yet,” she said, laughing.

“It’s only a question of time.”

“I’ll never be converted to Grit politics.”

“No, but you’ll be converted to me,” he told her, and drew her nearer.
“I’m going now, Dora. I dare say I shouldn’t have come. Every minute
counts today. Good-bye.”

She could not withhold her face from his asking lips, and he had bent to
take his privilege when a step in the hall threatened and divided them.

“It’s only Mr Hesketh going upstairs,” said Dora, with relief. “I
thought it was Father. Oh, Lorne--fly!”

“Hesketh!” Young Murchison’s face clouded. “Is he working for Winter,
too?”

“Lorne! What a thing to ask when you know he believes in your ideas.
But he’s a Conservative at home, you see, so he says he’s in an awkward
position, and he has been taking perfectly neutral ground lately. He
hasn’t a vote, anyway.”

“No,” said Lorne. “He’s of no consequence.”

The familiar easy step in the house of his beloved, the house he was
being entreated to leave with all speed, struck upon his heart and his
nerves. She, with her dull surface to the more delicate vibrations of
things, failed to perceive this, or perhaps she would have thought it
worth while to find some word to bring back his peace. She disliked
seeing people unhappy. When she was five years old and her kitten broke
its leg, she had given it to a servant to drown.

He took his hat, making no further attempt to caress her, and opened the
door. “I hope you WILL win, Lorne,” she said, half-resentfully, and he,
with forced cheerfulness, replied, “Oh, we’ll have a shot at it.” Then
with a little silent nod at her which, notwithstanding her provocations,
conveyed his love and trust, he went out into the struggle of the day.

In spite of Squire Ormiston’s confident prediction, it was known that
the fight would be hottest, among the townships, in Moneida Reservation.
Elgin itself, of course, would lead the van for excitement, would be
the real theatre for the arts of practical politics; but things would be
pretty warm in Moneida, too. It was for that reason that Bingham and
the rest strongly advised Lorne not to spend too much of the day in
the town, but to get out to Moneida early, and drive around with
Ormiston--stick to him like a fly to poison-paper.

“You leave Elgin to your friends,” said Bingham. “Just show your face
here and there wearing a smile of triumph, to encourage the crowd; but
don’t worry about the details--we’ll attend to them.”

“We can’t have him upsettin’ his own election by any interference with
the boys,” said Bingham to Horace Williams. “He’s got too long a nose
for all kinds of things to be comfortable in town today. He’ll do a
great deal less harm trotting round the Reserve braced up against old
Ormiston.”

So Elgin was left to the capable hands of the boys, for the furtherance
of the Liberal interest and the sacred cause of imperialism. Mr
Farquharson, whose experience was longer and whose nose presumably
shorter than the candidate’s, never abandoned the Town Ward. Bingham
skirmished between the polling-booths and the committee room. Horace
Williams was out all day--Rawlins edited the paper. The returns wouldn’t
be ready in time for anything but an extra anyhow, and the “Stand to
Arms, South Fox,” leader had been written two days ago. The rest was
millinery, or might be for all anybody would read of it. The other side
had a better idea of the value of their candidate than to send him into
the country. Walter Winter remained where he was most effective and most
at home. He had a neat little livery outfit, and he seemed to spend the
whole day in it accompanied by intimate personal friends who had never
spoken to him, much less driven with him, before. Two or three strangers
arrived the previous night at the leading hotels. Their business was
various, but they had one point in common: they were very solicitous
about their personal luggage. I should be sorry to assign their
politics, and none of them seemed to know much about the merits of
the candidates, so they are not perhaps very pertinent, except for the
curiosity shown by the public at the spectacle of gentlemen carrying
their own bags when there were porters to do it.

It was a day long remembered and long quoted. The weather was
spring-like, sun after a week’s thaw; it was pleasant to be abroad in
the relaxed air and the drying streets, that here and there sent
up threads of steam after the winter house-cleaning of their wooden
sidewalks. Voting was a privilege never unappreciated in Elgin; and
today the weather brought out every soul to the polls; the ladies of
his family waiting, in many instances, on the verandah, with shawls over
their heads, to hear the report of how the fight was going. Abby saw Dr
Harry back in his consulting room, and Dr Henry safely off to vote, and
then took the two children and went over to her father’s house because
she simply could not endure the suspense anywhere else. The adventurous
Stella picketed herself at a corner near the empty grocery which served
as a polling-booth for Subdivision Eleven, one of the most doubtful, but
was forced to retire at the sight of the first carryall full of men from
the Milburn Boiler Company flaunting a banner inscribed “We are Solid
for W.W.” Met in the hall by her sister, she protested that she hadn’t
cried till she got inside the gate, anyhow. Abby lectured her soundly
on her want of proper pride: she was much too big a girl to be “seen
around” on a day when her brother was “running,” if it were only for
school trustee. The other ladies of the family, having acquired proper
pride kept in the back of the house so as not to be tempted to look out
of the front windows. Mrs Murchison assumed a stoical demeanour and
made a pudding; though there was no reason to help Eliza, who was
sufficiently lacking in proper pride to ask the milkman whether Mr Lorne
wasn’t sure to be elected down there now. The milkman said he guessed
the best man ‘ud get in, but in a manner which roused general suspicion
as to which he had himself favoured.

“We’ll finish the month,” said Mrs Murchison, “and then not another
quart do we take from HIM--a gentleman that’s so uncertain when he’s
asked a simple question.”

The butcher came, and brought a jovial report without being asked for
it; said he was the first man to hand in a paper at his place, but they
were piling up there in great shape for Mr Murchison when he left.

“If he gets in, he gets in,” said Mrs Murchison. “And if he doesn’t
it won’t be because of not deserving to. Those were real nice cutlets
yesterday, Mr Price, and you had better send us a sirloin for tomorrow,
about six pounds; but it doesn’t matter to an ounce. And you can save us
sweetbreads for Sunday; I like yours better than Luff’s.”

John Murchison, Alec, and Oliver came shortly up to dinner, bringing
stirring tales from the field. There was the personator in Subdivision
Six of a dead man--a dead Grit--wanted by the bloodhounds of the other
side and tracked to the Reform committee room, where he was ostensibly
and publicly taking refuge.

“Why did he go there?” asked Stella, breathlessly.

“Why, to make it look like a put-up job of ours, of course, “said her
brother. “And it was a put-up job, a good old Tory fake. But they didn’t
calculate on Bingham and Bingham’s memory. Bingham happened to be in the
committee room, and he recognized this fellow for a regular political
tough from up Muskoka way, where they get six for a bottle of Canadian
and ten if it’s Scotch. ‘Why, good morning,’ says Bingham, ‘thought you
were in jail,’ and just then he catches sight of a couple of trailers
from the window. Well, Bingham isn’t just lightning smart, but then he
isn’t SLOW, you know. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you can’t stop here,’ and in
another second he was throwing the fellow out. Threw him out pretty
hard, too. I guess; right down the stairs, and Bingham on top. Met
Winter’s men at the door. ‘The next time you want information from
the headquarters of this association, gentlemen,’ Bingham said, ‘send
somebody respectable.’ Bingham thought the man was just any kind of low
spy at first, but when they claimed him for personation, Bingham just
laughed. ‘Don’t be so hard on your friends; he said. I don’t think we’ll
hear much more about that little racket.”

“Can’t anything be done to any of them?” asked Stella. “Not today, of
course, but when there’s time.”

“We’ll have to see about it, Stella,” said Alec. “When there’s time.”

“Talking about Bingham,” Oliver told them; “you know Bingham’s story
about Jim Whelan keeping sober for two weeks, for the first time in
twenty years, to vote for Winter? Wouldn’t touch a thing--no, he was
going to do it this time, if he died for it; it was disagreeable to
refuse drinks, but it was going to be worth his while. Been boasting
about the post-office janitorship Winter was to give him if he got in.
Well, in he came to Number Eleven this morning all dressed up, with a
clean collar, looking thirstier than any man you ever saw, and gets
his paper. Young Charlie Bingham is deputy returning officer at Number
Eleven. In a second back comes Whelan. ‘This ballot’s marked; he says;
‘you don’t fool me.’ ‘Is it?’ says Charlie, taking it out of his hand.
‘That’s very wrong, Jim; you shouldn’t have marked it,’ and drops it
into the ballot-box. Oh, Jim was wild! The paper had gone in blank, you
see, and he’d lost all those good drunks and his vote too! He was going
to have Charlie’s blood right away. But there it was--done. He’d handed
in his ballot--he couldn’t have another.”

They all laughed, I fear, at the unfortunate plight of the too
suspicious Whelan. “Why did he think the ballot was marked?” asked
Advena.

“Oh, there was a little smudge on it--a fly-spot or something, Charlie
says. But you couldn’t fool Whelan.”

“I hope,” said Stella meditatively, “that Lorne will get in by more than
one. He wouldn’t like to owe his election to a low-down trick like that”

“Don’t you be at all alarmed, you little girlish thing,” replied her
brother. “Lorne will get in by five hundred.”

John Murchison had listened to their excited talk, mostly in silence,
going on with his dinner as if that and nothing else were the important
matter of the moment. Mrs Murchison had had this idiosyncrasy of his
“to put up with” for over thirty years. She bore it now as long as she
could.

“FATHER!” she exploded at last. “Do you think Lorne will get in by five
hundred?”

Mr Murchison shook his head, and bestowed his whole attention upon the
paring of an apple. If he kept his hopes to himself, he also kept his
doubts. “That remains to be seen,” he said.

“Well, considering it’s your own son, I think you might show a little
more confidence,” said Mrs Murchison. “No thank you; no dessert for
me. With a member of the family being elected--or not--for a seat in
Parliament, I’m not the one to want dessert.”

Between Mr Murchison and the milkman that morning, Mrs Murchison felt
almost too much tried by the superior capacity for reticence.

It was seven in the evening before the ballot-boxes were all in the
hands of the sheriff, and nine before that officer found it necessary to
let the town know that it had piled up a majority of three hundred for
Walter Winter. He was not a supporter of Walter Winter, and he preferred
to wait until the returns began to come in from Clayfield and the
townships, in the hope that they would make the serious difference that
was required of them. The results were flashed one after the other
to the total from the windows of the Express and the Mercury upon the
cheering crowd that gathered in Market Square. There were moments of
wild elation, moments of deep suspense upon both sides, but when the
final addition and subtraction was made the enthusiastic voters of South
Fox, including Jim Whelan, who had neglected no further opportunity,
read, with yells and groans, hurrahs and catcalls, that they had elected
Mr Lorne Murchison to the Dominion House of Commons by a majority of
seventy.

Then the band began to play and all the tin whistles to rejoice. Young
and Windle had the grace to blow their sirens, and across the excited
darkness of the town came the long familiar boom of the Murchison Stove
Works. Every Liberal in Elgin who had any means of making a noise
made it. From the window of the Association committee room their young
fellow-townsman thanked them for the honour they had done him, while
his mother sat in the cab he had brought her down in and applauded
vigorously between tears, and his father took congratulations from a
hundred friendly hands. They all went home in a torchlight procession,
the band always playing, the tin whistles always performing; and it was
two in the morning before the occasion could in any sense be said to be
over.

Lights burned quite as late, however, in the Conservative committee
room, where matters were being arranged to bark threateningly at the
heels of victory next day. Victory looked like something that might
be made to turn and parley. A majority of seventy was too small for
finality. Her attention was called without twenty-four hours’ delay to
a paragraph in the Elgin Mercury, plainly authoritative, to the effect
that the election of Mr Murchison would be immediately challenged, on
the ground of the infringement in the electoral district of Moneida of
certain provisions of the Ontario Elections Act with the knowledge and
consent of the candidate, whose claim to the contested seat, it was
confidently expected, would be rendered within a very short time null
and void.



CHAPTER XXXI

“You can never trust an Indian,” said Mrs Murchison at the anxious
family council. “Well do I remember them when you were a little thing,
Advena, hanging round the town on a market-day; and the squaws coming
to the back door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just
knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the
squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for
the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four
coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt--!
But I thought they were all gone long ago.”

“There are enough of them left to make trouble all right,” said Alec.
“They don’t dress up like they used to, and I guess they send the
papooses to kindergarten now; but you’ll find plenty of them lying
around any time there’s nothing to do but vote and get drunk.”

Allowing for the natural exaggeration of partisanship, the facts about
the remaining red man of Moneida were much as Alec described them.
On market-days he slid easily, unless you looked twice, into what the
Express continues to call the farming community. Invariably, if you did
look twice, you would note that his stiff felt hat was an inch taller
in the crown than those worn generally by the farming community, the
pathetic assertion, perhaps, of an old sovereignty; invariably, too
his coat and trousers betrayed a form within, which, in the effort at
adaptation, had become high-shouldered and lank of leg. And the brown
skin was there to be noticed, though you might pass it by, and the high
cheek-bones and the liquidly muddy eye. He had taken on the signs of
civilization at the level which he occupied; the farming community
had lent him its look of shrewdness in small bargains and its rakish
sophistication in garments, nor could you always assume with certainty,
except at Fox County fairs and elections, that he was intoxicated. So
much Government had done for him in Fox County, where the “Reservation,”
 nursing the dying fragment of his race, testified that there is such a
thing as political compunction. Out in the wide spaces of the West he
still protects his savagery; they know an Indian there today as far as
they can see him, without a second glance.

And in Moneida, upon polling-days, he still, as Alec said, “made
trouble.” Perhaps it would be more to the fact to say that he presented
the elements of which trouble is made. Civilization had given him a
vote, not with his coat and trousers, but shortly after; and he had not
yet learned to keep it anywhere but in his pocket, whence the transfer
was easy, and could be made in different ways. The law contemplated only
one, the straight drop into the ballot-box; but the “boys” had other
views. The law represented one level of political sentiment, the boys
represented another; both parties represented the law, both parties were
represented by the boys; and on the occasion of the South Fox election
the boys had been active in Moneida. There are, as we know, two kinds
of activity on these occasions, one being set to observe the other;
and Walter Winter’s boys, while presumably neglecting no legitimate
opportunity of their own, claimed to have been highly successful in
detecting the methods of the other side.

The Indians owed their holdings, their allowances, their school, and
their protecting superintendent, Squire Ormiston, to a Conservative
Government. It made a grateful bond of which a later Conservative
Government was not, perhaps, unaware, when it added the ballot to
its previous benefits. The Indians, therefore, on election-days, were
supposed to “go solid” for the candidate in whom they had been taught
to see good will. If they did not go quite solid, the other side might
point to the evolution of the political idea in every dissentient--a
gladdening spectacle, indeed, on which, however, the other side seldom
showed any desire to dwell.

Hitherto the desires and intentions of the “Reserve” had been
exemplified in its superintendent. Squire Ormiston had never led his
wards to the polls--there were strong reasons against that. But the
squire made no secret of his politics, either before or, unluckily,
after he changed them. The Indians had always known that they were
voting on the same side as “de boss.” They were likely, the friends
of Mr Winter thought, to know now that they were voting on a different
side. This was the secret of Mr Winter’s friends’ unusual diligence on
voting-day in Moneida. The mere indication of a wish on the part of the
superintendent would constitute undue influence in the eye of the law.
The squire was not the most discreet of men--often before it had been
the joke of Conservative councils how near the old man had come to
making a case for the Grits in connection with this chief or that. I
will not say that he was acquainted with the famous letter from Queen
Victoria, affectionately bidding her Indian children to vote for the
Conservative candidate. But perhaps he had not adhered to the strictest
interpretation of the law which gave him fatherly influence in
everything pertaining to his red-skinned charges’ interests temporal and
spiritual, excepting only their sacred privilege of the ballot. He may
even have held it in some genial derision, their sacred privilege; it
would be natural, he had been there among them in unquestioned authority
so long. Now it had assumed an importance. The squire looked at it with
the ardour of a converted eye. When he told Mr Farquharson that he could
bring Moneida with him to a Liberal victory, he thought and spoke of the
farmers of the township not of his wards of the Reserve. Yet as the day
approached these would infallibly become voters in his eyes, to swell or
to diminish the sum of Moneida’s loyalty to the Empire. They remembered
all this in the committee room of his old party. “The squire,” they said
to one another, “will give himself away this time if ever he did.” Then
young Murchison hadn’t known any better than to spend the best part of
the day out there, and there were a dozen witnesses to swear that old
Ormiston introduced him to three or four of the chiefs. That was basis
enough for the boys detailed to watch Moneida, basis enough in the end
for a petition constructed to travel to the High Court at Toronto
for the purpose of rendering null and void the election of Mr Lorne
Murchison, and transferring the South Fox seat to the candidate of the
opposite party.

That possibility had been promptly frustrated by a cross petition. There
was enough evidence in Subdivision Eleven, according to Bingham, to
void the Tory returns on six different counts; but the house-cat sold by
Peter Finnigan to Mr Winter for five dollars would answer all practical
purposes. It was a first-rate mouser, Bingham said, and it would settle
Winter. They would have plenty of other charges “good and ready” if
Finnigan’s cat should fail them, but Bingham didn’t think the court
would get to anything else; he had great confidence in the cat.

The petitions had been lodged with promptness. “Evidence,” as Mr Winter
remarked, “is like a good many other things--better when it’s hot,
especially the kind you get on the Reserve.” To which, when he heard it,
Bingham observed sarcastically that the cat would keep. The necessary
thousand dollars were ready on each side the day after the election,
lodged in court the next. Counsel were as promptly engaged--the Liberals
selected Cruickshank--and the suit against the elected candidate,
beginning with charges against his agents in the town, was shortly in
full hearing before the judges sent from Toronto to try it. Meanwhile
the Elgin Mercury had shown enterprise in getting hold of Moneida
evidence, and foolhardiness, as the Express pointed out, in publishing
it before the matter was reached in court. There was no foolhardiness
in printing what the Express knew about Finnigan’s cat; it was just
a common cat, and Walter Winter paid five dollars for it, Finnigan
declaring that if Mr Winter hadn’t filled him up with bad whiskey before
the bargain, he wouldn’t have let her go under ten, he was that fond
of the creature. The Express pointed out that this was grasping of
Finnigan, as the cat had never left him, and Mr Winter showed no
intention of taking her away; but there was nothing sub judice about the
cat. Finnigan, before he sobered up, had let her completely out of the
bag. It was otherwise with the charges that were to be made, according
to the Mercury, on the evidence of Chief Joseph Fry and another member
of his tribe, to the effect that he and his Conservative friends had
been instructed by Squire Ormiston and Mr Murchison to vote on this
occasion for both the candidates, thereby producing, when the box was
opened, eleven ballot-papers inscribed with two crosses instead of one,
and valueless. Here, should the charges against a distinguished and
highly respected Government official fail, as in the opinion of the
Express they undoubtedly would fail of substantiation was a big
libel case all dressed and ready and looking for the Mercury office.
“Foolish--foolish,” wrote Mr Williams at the close of his editorial
comments. “Very ill-advised.”

“They’ve made no case so far,” Mr Murchison assured the family. “I saw
Williams on my way up, and he says the evidence of that corner grocery
fellow--what’s his name?--went all to pieces this morning. Oliver was in
court. He says one of the judges--Hooke--lost his patience altogether.”

“They won’t do anything with the town charges,” Alec said, “and they
know it. They’re saving themselves for Moneida and old man Ormiston.”

“Well, I heartily wish,” said Mrs Murchison, in a tone of grievance with
the world at large, and if you were not responsible you might keep out
of the way--“I heartily wish that Lorne had stayed at home that day and
not got mixed up with old man Ormiston.”

“They’ll find it pretty hard to fix anything on Lorne,” said Alec. “But
I guess the Squire did go off his head a little.”

“Have they anything more than Indian evidence?” asked Advena.

“We don’t know what they’ve got,” said her brother darkly “and we won’t
till Wednesday, when they expect to get round to it.”

“Indian evidence will be a poor dependence in Cruickshank’s hands,” Mr
Murchison told them, with a chuckle. “They say this Chief Joseph Fry is
going about complaining that he always got three dollars for one vote
before, and this time he expected six for two, and got nothing!”

“Chief Joseph Fry!” exclaimed Alec. “They make me tired with their Chief
Josephs and Chief Henrys! White Clam Shell--that was the name he got
when he wasn’t christened.”

“That’s the name,” remarked Advena, “that he probably votes under.”

“Well,” said Mrs Murchison, “it was very kind of Squire Ormiston to
give Lorne his support, but it seems to me that as far as Moneida is
concerned he would have done better alone.”

“No, I guess he wouldn’t, Mother,” said Alec. “Moneida came right round
with the Squire, outside the Reserve. If it hadn’t been for the majority
there we would have lost the election. The old man worked hard, and
Lorne is grateful to him, and so he ought to be.”

“If they carry the case against Lorne,” said Stella, “he’ll be
disqualified for seven years.”

“Only if they prove him personally mixed up in it,” said the father.
“And that,” he added with a concentration of family sentiment in the
emphasis of it, “they’ll not do.”



CHAPTER XXXII

It was late afternoon when the train from the West deposited Hugh Finlay
upon the Elgin platform, the close of one of those wide, wet, uncertain
February days when the call of spring is on the wind though spring
is weeks away. The lights of the town flashed and glimmered down the
streets under the bare swaying maple branches. The early evening was
full of soft bluster; the air was conscious with an appeal of nature,
vague yet poignant. The young man caught at the strange sympathy that
seemed to be abroad for his spirit. He walked to his house, courting it,
troubled by it. They were expecting him that evening at Dr Drummond’s,
and there it was his intention to go. But on his way he would call for
a moment to see Advena Murchison. He had something to tell her. It would
be news of interest at Dr Drummond’s also; but it was of no consequence,
within an hour or so, when they should receive it there, while it was
of great consequence that Advena should hear it at the earliest
opportunity, and from him. There is no weighing or analysing the burden
of such a necessity as this. It simply is important: it makes its own
weight; and those whom it concerns must put aside other matters until
it has been accomplished. He would tell her: they would accept it for a
moment together, a moment during which he would also ascertain whether
she was well and strong, with a good chance of happiness--God protect
her--in the future that he should not know. Then he would go on to Dr
Drummond’s.

The wind had risen when he went out again; it blew a longer blast,
and the trees made a steady sonorous rhythm in it. The sky was full of
clouds that dashed upon the track of a failing moon; there was portent
everywhere, and a hint of tumult at the end of the street. No two ways
led from Finlay’s house to his first destination. River Street made
an angle with that on which the Murchisons lived--half a mile to the
corner, and three-quarters the other way. Drops drove in his face as he
strode along against the wind, stilling his unquiet heart, that leaped
before him to that brief interview. As he took the single turning he
came into the full blast of the veering, irresolute storm. The street
was solitary and full of the sound of the blown trees, wild and
uplifting. Far down the figure of a woman wavered before the wind across
the zone of a blurred lamp-post. She was coming toward him. He bent his
head and lowered his umbrella and lost sight of her as they approached,
she with the storm behind her, driven with hardly more resistance than
the last year’s blackened leaves that blew with her, he assailed by it
and making the best way he could. Certainly the wind was taking her part
and his, when in another moment her skirt whipped against him and he saw
her face glimmer out. A mere wreck of lines and shadows it seemed in the
livid light, with suddenly perceiving eyes and lips that cried his name.
She had on a hat and a cloak, but carried no umbrella, and her hands
were bare and wet. Pitifully the storm blew her into his arms, a tossed
and straying thing that could not speak for sobs; pitifully and with a
rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that refuge. A rising
fear and a great solicitude laid a finger upon his craving embrace of
her; he had a sense of something strangely different in her, of the
unknown irremediable. Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had never
been before; her plight but made her in a manner sweeter; the storm that
brought her barricaded them in the empty spaces of the street with a
divinely entreating solitude. He had been prepared to meet her in the
lighted decorum of her father’s house and he knew what he should say.
He was not prepared to take her out of the tempest, helpless and weeping
and lost for the harbour of his heart, and nothing could he say. He
locked his lips against all that came murmuring to them. But his arms
tightened about her and he drew her into the shelter of a wall that
jutted out in the irregular street; and there they stood and clung
together in a long, close, broken silence that covered the downfall of
her spirit. It was the moment of their great experience of one another;
never again, in whatever crisis, could either know so deep, so wonderful
a fathoming of the other soul. Once as it passed, Advena put up her hand
and touched his cheek: There were tears on it, and she trembled, and
wound her arm about his neck, and held up her face to his. “No,” he
muttered, and crushed it against his breast. There without complaint
she let it lie; she was all submission to him: his blood leaped and his
spirit groaned with the knowledge of it.

“Why did you come out? Why did you come, dear?” he said at last.

“I don’t know. There was such a wind. I could not stay in the house.”

She spoke timidly, in a voice that should have been new to him, but that
it was, above all, her voice.

“I was on my way to you.”

“I know. I thought you might perhaps come. If you had not--I think I was
on my way to you.”

It seemed not unnatural.

“Did you find--any message from me when you came?” she asked presently,
in a quieted, almost a contented tone.

It shot--the message--before his eyes, though he had seen it no message,
in the preoccupation of his arrival.

“I found a rose on my dressing-table,” he told her; and the rose stood
for him in a wonder of tenderness, looking back.

“I smuggled it in,” she confessed, “I knew your old servant--she used
to be with us. The others--from Dr Drummond’s--have been there all day
making it warm and comfortable for you. I had no right to do anything
like that, but I had the right, hadn’t I, to bring the rose?”

“I don’t know,” he answered her, hard-pressed, “how we are to bear
this.”

She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of a surgeon’s
knife.

“We are not to bear it,” she said eagerly. “The rose is to tell you
that. I didn’t mean it, when I left it, to be anything more--more than a
rose; but now I do. I didn’t even know when I came out tonight. But
now I do. We aren’t to bear it, Hugh. I don’t want it so--now. I
can’t--can’t have it so.”

She came nearer to him again and caught with her two hands the lapels
of his coat. He closed his own over them and looked down at her in that
half-detachment, which still claimed and held her.

“Advena,” he whispered, out of the sudden clamour in his mind, “she
can’t be--she isn’t--nothing has happened to her?”

She smiled faintly, but her eyes were again full of fear at his
implication of the only way.

“Oh, no!” she said. “But you have been away, and she has come. I have
seen her; and oh! she won’t care, Hugh--she won’t care.”

Her asking, straining face seemed to gather and reflect all the light
there was in the shifting night about them. The rain had stopped, but
the wind still hurtled past, whirling the leaves from one darkness to
another. They were as isolated, as outlawed there in the wild wet wind
as they were in the confusion of their own souls.

“We must care,” he said helplessly, clinging to the sound and form of
the words.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “No, no! Indeed I know now what is possible and
what is not!”

For an instant her eyes searched the rigid lines of his face in
astonishment. In their struggle to establish the impossible she had been
so far ahead, so greatly the more confident and daring, had tempted him
to such heights, scorning every dizzy verge, that now, when she turned
quite back from their adventure, humbly confessing it too hard, she
could not understand how he should continue to set himself doggedly
toward it. Perhaps, too, she trusted unconsciously in her prerogative.
He loved her, and she him: before she would not, now she would. Before
she had preferred an ideal to the desire of her heart; now it lay about
her; her strenuous heart had pulled it down to foolish ruin, and how
should she lie abased with it and see him still erect and full of the
deed they had to do?

“Come,” he said, “let me take you home, dear,” and at that and some
accent in it that struck again at hope, she sank at his feet in a
torrent of weeping, clasping them and entreating him, “Oh send her away!
Send her away!”

He lifted her, and was obliged literally to support her. Her hat had
fallen off; he stroked her hair and murmured such comfort to her as we
have for children in their extremity, of which the burden is chiefly
love and “Don’t cry.” She grew gradually quieter, drawing one knows not
what restitution from the intrinsic in him; but there was no pride in
her, and when she said “Let me go home now,” it was the broken word of
hapless defeat. They struggled together out into the boisterous street,
and once or twice she failed and had to stop and turn. Then she would
cling to a wall or a tree, putting his help aside with a gesture in
which there was again some pitiful trace of renunciation. They went
almost without a word, each treading upon the heart of the other toward
the gulf that was to come. They reached it at the Murchisons’ gate, and
there they paused, as briefly as possible, since pause was torture, and
he told her what he could not tell her before.

“I have accepted the charge of the White Water Mission Station in
Alberta,” he said. “I, too, learned very soon after I left you what was
possible and what was not. I go as soon as--things can be set in order
here. Good-bye, my dear love, and may God help us both.”

She looked at him with a pitiful effort at a steady lip. “I must try
to believe it,” she said. “And afterward, when it comes true for you,
remember this--I was ashamed.”

Then he saw her pass into her father’s house, and he took the road to
his duty and Dr Drummond’s.

His extremity was very great. Through it lines came to him from the
beautiful archaic inheritance of his Church. He strode along hearing
them again and again in the dying storm.

   So, I do stretch my hands
      To Thee my help alone;
   Thou only understands
      All my complaint and moan.

He listened to the prayer on the wind, which seemed to offer it for him,
listened and was gravely touched. But he himself was far from the throes
of supplication. He was looking for the forces of his soul; and by the
time he reached Dr Drummond’s door we may suppose that he had found
them.

Sarah who let him in, cried, “How wet you are, Mr Finlay!” and took his
overcoat to dry in the kitchen. The Scotch ladies, she told him, and
Mrs Forsyth, had gone out to tea, but they would be back right away, and
meanwhile “the Doctor” was expecting him in the study--he knew the way.

Finlay did know the way but, as a matter of fact, there had been time
for him to forget it; he had not crossed Dr Drummond’s threshold since
the night on which the Doctor had done all, as he would have said, that
was humanly possible to bring him, Finlay, to reason upon the matter of
his incredible entanglement in Bross. The door at the end of the passage
was ajar however, as if impatient; and Dr Drummond himself, standing in
it, heightened that appearance, with his “Come you in, Finlay. Come you
in!”

The Doctor looked at the young man in a manner even more acute, more
shrewd, and more kindly than was his wont. His eye searched Finlay
thoroughly, and his smile seemed to broaden as his glance travelled.

“Man,” he said, “you’re shivering,” and rolled him an armchair near the
fire. (“The fellow came into the room,” he would say, when he told the
story afterward to the person most concerned, “as if he were going to
the stake!”) “This is extraordinary weather we are having, but I think
the storm is passing over.”

“I hope,” said Finlay, “that my aunt and Miss Cameron are well. I
understand they are out.”

“Oh, very well--finely. They’re out at present, but you’ll see them
bye-and-bye. An excellent voyage over they had--just the eight days. But
we’ll be doing it in less than that when the new fast line is running to
Halifax. But four days of actual ocean travelling they say now it will
take. Four days from imperial shore to shore! That should incorporate
us--that should bring them out and take us home.”

The Doctor had not taken a seat himself, but was pacing the study, his
thumbs in his waistcoat pockets; and a touch of embarrassment seemed
added to the inveterate habit.

“I hear the ladies had pleasant weather.” Finlay remarked.

“Capital--capital! You won’t smoke? I know nothing about these cigars;
they’re some Grant left behind him--a chimney, that man Grant. Well,
Finlay”--he threw himself into the arm-chair on the other side of the
hearth--“I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Surely,” said Finlay restively, “it has all been said, sir.”

“No, it has not all been said,” Dr Drummond retorted. “No, it has
not. There’s more to be said, and you must hear it, Finlay, with such
patience as you have. But I speak the truth when I say that I don’t know
how to begin.”

The young man gave him opportunity, gazing silently into the fire.
He was hardly aware that Dr Drummond had again left his seat when he
started violently at a clap on the shoulder.

“Finlay!” exclaimed the Doctor. “You won’t be offended? No--you couldn’t
be offended!”

It was half-jocular, half-anxious, wholly inexplicable.

“At what,” asked Hugh Finlay, “should I be offended?”

Again, with a deep sigh, the Doctor dropped into his chair. “I see
I must begin at the beginning,” he said. But Finlay, with sudden
intuition, had risen and stood before him trembling, with a hand against
the mantelpiece.

“No,” he said, “if you have anything to tell me of importance, for God’s
sake begin at the end.”

Some vibration in his voice went straight to the heart of the Doctor,
banishing as it travelled, every irrelevant thing that it encountered.

“Then the end is this, Finlay,” he said. “The young woman, Miss Christie
Cameron, whom you were so wilfully bound and determined to marry, has
thrown you over--that is, if you will give her back her word--has jilted
you--that is, if you’ll let her away. Has thought entirely better of the
matter.”

(“He stared out of his great sockets of eyes as if the sky had fallen,”
 Dr Drummond would say, recounting it.)

“For--for what reason?” asked Finlay, hardly yet able to distinguish
between the sound of disaster and the sense that lay beneath.

“May I begin at the beginning?” asked the Doctor, and Hugh silently
nodded.

(“He sat there and never took his eyes off me, twisting his fingers. I
might have been in a confession-box,” Dr Drummond would explain to her.)

“She came here, Miss Cameron, with that good woman, Mrs Kilbannon, it
will be three weeks next Monday,” he said, with all the air of beginning
a story that would be well worth hearing. “And I wasn’t very well
pleased to see her, for reasons that you know. However, that’s neither
here nor there. I met them both at the station, and I own to you that
I thought when I made Miss Cameron’s acquaintance that you were getting
better than you deserved in the circumstances. You were a thousand miles
away--now that was a fortunate thing!--and she and Mrs Kilbannon just
stayed here and made themselves as comfortable as they could. And that
was so comfortable that anyone could see with half an eye”--the Doctor’s
own eye twinkled--“so far as Miss Cameron was concerned, that she wasn’t
pining in any sense of the word. But I wasn’t sorry for you, Finlay, on
that account.” He stopped to laugh enjoyingly, and Finlay blushed like a
girl.

“I just let matters bide and went about my own business. Though
after poor Mrs Forsyth here--a good woman enough, but the brains of a
rabbit--it was pleasant to find these intelligent ladies at every meal,
and wonderful how quick they were at picking up the differences between
the points of Church administration here and at home. That was a thing I
noticed particularly in Miss Cameron.

“Matters went smoothly enough--smoothly enough--till one afternoon that
foolish creature Advena Murchison”--Finlay started--“came here to pay
a call on Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. It was well and kindly meant,
but it was not a wise-like thing to do. I didn’t exactly make it out,
but it seems that she came all because of you and on account of you; and
the ladies didn’t understand it, and Mrs Kilbannon came to me. My word,
but there was a woman to deal with! Who was this young lady, and what
was she to you that she should go anywhere or do anything in your name?
Without doubt”--he put up a staying hand--“it was foolish of Advena. And
what sort of freedom, and how far, and why, and what way, and I tell you
it was no easy matter, to quiet her. ‘Is Miss Cameron distressed about
it?’ said I. ‘Not a bit,’ said she, ‘but I am, and I must have the
rights of this matter,’ said she, ‘if I have to put it to my nephew
himself.’

“It was at that point, Finlay, that the idea--just then that the thought
came into my mind--well I won’t say absolutely, but practically for the
first time--Why can’t this matter be arranged on a basis to suit
all parties? So I said to her, ‘Mrs Kilbannon,’ I said, ‘if you had
reasonable grounds for it, do you think you could persuade your niece
not to marry Hugh Finlay?’ Wait--patience!” He held up his hand, and
Finlay gripped the arm of his chair again.

“She just stared at me. ‘Are you gone clean daft, Dr Drummond?’ she
said. ‘There could be no grounds serious enough for that. I will not
believe that Hugh Finlay has compromised himself in any way.’ I had
to stop her; I was obliged to tell her there was nothing of the
kind--nothing of the kind; and later on I’ll have to settle with my
conscience about that. ‘I meant,’ I said, the reasonable grounds of an
alternative: ‘An alternative?’ said she. To cut a long story short,”
 continued the Doctor, leaning forward, always with the finger in his
waistcoat pocket to emphasize what he said, “I represented to Mrs
Kilbannon that Miss Cameron was not in sentimental relations toward you,
that she had some reason to suspect you of having placed your affections
elsewhere, and that I myself was very much taken up with what I had seen
of Miss Cameron. In brief, I said to Mrs Kilbannon that if Miss Cameron
saw no objection to altering the arrangements to admit of it, I should
be pleased to marry her myself. The thing was much more suitable in
every way. I was fifty-three years of age last week, I told her, ‘but’
I said, ‘Miss Cameron is thirty-six or seven, if she’s a day, and Finlay
there would be like nothing but a grown-up son to her. I can offer her
a good home and the minister’s pew in a church that any woman might be
proud of--and though far be it from me,’ I said, ‘to depreciate mission
work, either home or foreign, Miss Cameron in that field would be little
less than thrown away. Think it over,’ I said.

“Well, she was pleased, I could see that. But she didn’t half like the
idea of changing the original notion. It was leaving you to your own
devices that weighed most with her against it; she’d set her heart on
seeing you married with her approval. So I said to her, to make an end
of it, ‘Well, Mrs Kilbannon,’ I said, ‘suppose we say no more about it
for the present. I think I see the finger of Providence in this matter;
but you’ll talk it over with Miss Cameron, and we’ll all just make it,
for the next few days, the subject of quiet and sober reflection. Maybe
at the end of that time I’ll think better of it myself, though that is
not my expectation.’

“‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll just leave it to Christie.’”

As the Doctor went on with his tale, relaxation had stolen dumbly about
Finlay’s brow and lips. He dropped from the plane of his own absorption
to the humorous common sense of the recital: it claimed and held him
with infinite solace. His eyes had something like the light of laughter
in them, flashing behind a cloud, as he fixed them on Dr Drummond, and
said, “And did you?”

“We did,” said Dr Drummond, getting up once more from his chair, and
playing complacently with his watch-charms as he took another turn about
the study. “We left it to Miss Cameron, and the result is”--the Doctor
stopped sharply and wheeled round upon Finlay--“the result is--why, the
upshot seems to be that I’ve cut you out, man!”

Finlay measured the little Doctor standing there twisting his
watch-chain, beaming with achieved satisfaction, in a consuming desire
to know how far chance had been kind to him, and how far he had to be
simply, unspeakably, grateful. He stared in silence, occupied with his
great debt; it was like him that that, and not his liberty, should be
first in his mind. We who have not his opportunity may find it more
difficult to decide; but from our private knowledge of Dr Drummond we
may remember what poor Finlay probably forgot at the moment, that
even when pitted against Providence, the Doctor was a man of great
determination.

The young fellow got up, still speechless, and confronted Dr Drummond.
He was troubled for something to say; the chambers of his brain seemed
empty or reiterating foolish sounds. He pressed the hand the minister
offered him and his lips quivered. Then a light came into his face, and
he picked up his hat.

“And I’ll say this for myself,” chuckled Dr Drummond. “It was no hard
matter.”

Finlay looked at him and smiled. “It would not be, sir,” he said lamely.
Dr Drummond cast a shrewd glance at him and dropped the tone of banter.

“Aye--I know! It’s no joking matter,” he said, and with a hand behind
the young man’s elbow, he half pushed him to the door and took out his
watch. He must always be starting somebody, something, in the right
direction, the Doctor. “It’s not much after half-past nine, Finlay,” he
said. “I notice the stars are out.”

It had the feeling of a colloquial benediction, and Finlay carried it
with him all the way.

It was nevertheless nearly ten when he reached her father’s house,
so late that the family had dispersed for the night. Yet he had the
hardihood to ring, and the hour blessed them both, for Advena on the
stair, catching who knows what of presage out of the sound, turned, and
found him at the threshold herself.



CHAPTER XXXIII

“I understand how you must feel in the matter, Murchison, said Henry
Cruickshank. “It’s the most natural thing in the world that you should
want to clear yourself definitely, especially as you say, since the
charges have been given such wide publicity. On the other hand, I think
it quite possible that you exaggerate the inference that will be drawn
from our consenting to saw off with the other side on the two principal
counts.”

“The inference will be,” said Lorne “that there’s not a pin to choose
between Winter’s political honesty and my own. I’m no Pharisee, but
I don’t think I can sit down under that. I can’t impair my possible
usefulness by accepting a slur upon my reputation at the very
beginning.”

“Politics are very impersonal. It wouldn’t be remembered a year.”

“Winter of course,” said young Murchison moodily, “doesn’t want to take
any chances. He knows he’s done for if we go on. Seven years for him
would put him pretty well out of politics. And it would suit him down to
the ground to fight it over again. There’s nothing he would like better
to see than another writ for South Fox.”

“That’s all right,” the lawyer responded, “but Moneida doesn’t look
altogether pleasant, you know. We may have good grounds for supposing
that the court will find you clear of that business; but Ormiston, so
far as I can make out, was playing the fool down there for a week before
polling-day, and there are three or four Yellow Dogs and Red Feathers
only too anxious to pay back a grudge on him. We’ll have to fight again,
there’s no doubt about that. The only question is whether we’ll ruin
Ormiston first or not. Have you seen Bingham?”

“I know what Bingham thinks,” said Lorne, impatiently. “The Squire’s
position is a different consideration. I don’t see how I can--However,
I’ll go across to the committee room now and talk it over.”

It is doubtful whether young Murchison knew all that Bingham thought;
Bingham so seldom told it all. There were matters in the back of
Bingham’s mind that prompted him to urge the course that Cruickshank had
been empowered by the opposing counsel to suggest--party considerations
that it would serve no useful purpose to talk over with Murchison.
Bingham put it darkly when he said he had quite as much hay on his
fork as he cared to tackle already, implying that the defence
of indiscretions in Moneida was quite an unnecessary addition.
Contingencies seemed probable, arising out of the Moneida charges that
might affect the central organization of the party in South Fox to an
extent wholly out of proportion with the mere necessity of a second
election. Bingham talked it over with Horace Williams, and both of
them with Farquharson; they were all there to urge the desirability of
“sawing off” upon Lorne when he found them at headquarters. Their most
potent argument was, of course, the Squire and the immediate dismissal
that awaited him under the law if undue influence were proved against
him. Other considerations found the newly elected member for South
Fox obstinate and troublesome, but to that he was bound to listen, and
before that he finally withdrew his objections. The election would
come on again, as happened commonly enough. Bingham could point to
the opening, in a few days, of a big flour-milling industry across
the river, which would help; operations on the Drill Hall and
the Post-Office would be hurried on at once, and the local party
organization would be thoroughly overhauled. Bingham had good reason for
believing that they could entirely regain their lost ground, and at the
same time dissipate the dangerous impression that South Fox was being
undermined. Their candidate gave a reluctant ear to it all, and in the
end agreed to everything.

So that Chief Joseph Fry--the White Clam Shell of his own lost
fires--was never allowed the chance of making good the election losses
of that year, as he had confidently expected to do when the charge came
on; nor was it given to any of the Yellow Dogs and Red Feathers of Mr
Cruickshank’s citation to boast at the tribal dog-feasts of the future,
of the occasion on which they had bested “de boss.” Neither was any
further part in public affairs, except by way of jocular reference,
assigned to Finnigan’s cat. The proceedings of the court abruptly
terminated, the judges reported the desirability of a second contest,
and the public accepted with a wink. The wink in any form was hateful to
Lorne Murchison, but he had not to encounter it long.

The young man had changed in none of the aspects he presented to his
fellow-citizens since the beginning of the campaign. In the public eye
he wore the same virtues as he wore the same clothes; he summed up even
a greater measure of success; his popularity was unimpaired. He went as
keenly about the business of life, handling its details with the same
capable old drawl. Only his mother, with the divination of mothers,
declared that since the night of the opera house meeting Lorne had
been “all worked up.” She watched him with furtive anxious looks, was
solicitous about his food, expressed relief when she knew him to be
safely in bed and asleep. He himself observed himself with discontent,
unable to fathom his extraordinary lapse from self-control on the night
of his final address. He charged it to the strain of unavoidable office
work on top of the business of the campaign, abused his nerves, talked
of a few days’ rest when they had settled Winter. He could think of
nothing but the points he had forgotten when he had his great chance.
“The flag should have come in at the end,” he would say to himself,
trying vainly to remember where it did come in. He was ill pleased with
the issue of that occasion; and it was small compensation to be told by
Stella that his speech gave her shivers up and down her back.

Meanwhile the theory of Empire coursed in his blood, fed by the
revelation of the future of his country in every newspaper, by the
calculated prophecies of American onlookers, and by the telegrams which
repeated the trumpet notes of Wallingham’s war upon the mandarinate of
Great Britain. It occupied him so that he began to measure and limit
what he had to say about it, and to probe the casual eye for sympathy
before he would give an inch of rope to his enthusiasm. He found it as
hard as ever to understand that the public interest should be otherwise
preoccupied, as it plainly was, that the party organ, terrified of
Quebec, should shuffle away from the subject with perfunctory and
noncommittal reference, that among the men he met in the street,
nobody’s blood seemed stirred, whatever the day’s news was from England.
He subscribed to the Toronto Post, the leading organ of the Tories,
because of its fuller reports and more sympathetic treatment of the
Idea, due to the fact that the Idea originated in a brain temporarily
affiliated to the Conservative party. If the departure to imperial
preference had any damage in it for Canadian interests, it would be
for those which the Post made its special care; but the spirit of party
draws the breath of expediency, and the Post flaunting the Union Jack
every other day, put secondary manufactures aside for future discussion,
and tickled the wheat-growers with the two-shilling advantage they were
coming into at the hands of the English Conservatives, until Liberal
leaders began to be a little anxious about a possible loss of
wheat-growing votes. It was, as John Murchison said, a queer position
for everybody concerned; queer enough, no doubt, to admit a Tory journal
into the house on sufferance and as a special matter; but he had a
disapproving look for it as it lay on the hall floor, and seldom was the
first to open it.

Nevertheless Lorne found more satisfaction in talking imperialism with
his father than with anyone else. While the practical half of John
Murchison was characteristically alive to the difficulties involved,
the sentimental half of him was ready at any time to give out cautious
sparks of sympathy with the splendour of Wallingham’s scheme; and he
liked the feeling that a son of his should hark back in his allegiance
to the old land. There was a kind of chivalry in the placing of certain
forms of beauty--political honour and public devotion, which blossomed
best, it seemed, over there--above the material ease and margin of the
new country, and even above the grand chance it offered for a man to
make his mark. Mr Murchison was susceptible to this in anyone, and
responsive to it in his son.

As to the local party leaders, they had little more than a shrug for the
subject. So far as they were concerned, there was no Empire and no Idea;
Wallingham might as well not have been born. It seemed to Lorne that
they maintained toward him personally a special reticence about it.
Reticence indeed characterized their behaviour generally during the
period between the abandonment of the suits and the arrangement of the
second Liberal convention. They had little advice for him about his
political attitude, little advice about anything. He noticed that his
presence on one or two occasions seemed to embarrass them, and that his
arrival would sometimes have a disintegrating effect upon a group in the
post-office or at a street corner. He added it, without thinking, to his
general heaviness; they held it a good deal against him, he supposed, to
have reduced their proud standing majority to a beggarly two figures; he
didn’t blame them.

I cannot think that the sum of these depressions alone would have
been enough to overshadow so buoyant a soul as Lorne Murchison’s.
The characteristics of him I have tried to convey were grafted on an
excellent fund of common sense. He was well aware of the proportions of
things; he had no despair of the Idea, nor would he despair should the
Idea etherealize and fly away. Neither had he, for his personal honour,
any morbid desires toward White Clam Shell or Finnigan’s cat. His luck
had been a good deal better than it might have been; he recognized that
as fully as any sensible young man could, and as for the Great Chance,
and the queer grip it had on him, he would have argued that too if
anyone had approached him curiously about it. There I think we might
doubt his conclusions. There is nothing subtler, more elusive to trace
than the intercurrents of the emotions. Politics and love are thought
of at opposite poles, and Wallingham perhaps would have laughed to know
that he owed an exalted allegiance in part to a half-broken heart. Yet
the impulse that is beyond our calculation, the thing we know potential
in the blood but not to be summoned or conditioned, lies always in the
shadow of the ideal; and who can analyse that, and say, “Of this class
is the will to believe in the integrity of the beloved and false;
of that is the desire to lift a nation to the level of its
mountain-ranges”? Both dispositions have a tendency to overwork the
heart; and it is easy to imagine that they might interact. Lorne
Murchison’s wish, which was indeed a burning longing and necessity,
to believe in the Dora Milburn of his passion, had been under a strain
since the night on which he brought her the pledge which she refused
to wear. He had hardly been conscious of it in the beginning, but by
constant suggestion it had grown into his knowledge, and for weeks he
had taken poignant account of it. His election had brought him no nearer
a settlement with her objection to letting the world know of their
relations. The immediate announcement that it was to be disputed gave
Dora another chance, and once again postponed the assurance that he
longed for with a fever which was his own condemnation of her, if he
could have read that sign. For months he had seen so little of her, had
so altered his constant habit of going to the Milburns’, that his family
talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful
speculations. They did not wonder or speculate at the Milburns’. It was
an axiom there that it is well to do nothing rashly.

Lorne, in the office on Market Street, had been replying to Mr Fulke to
the effect that the convention could hardly be much longer postponed,
but that as yet he had no word of the date of it when the telephone bell
rang and Mr Farquharson’s voice at the other end asked him to come over
to the committee room. “They’ve decided about it now, I imagine,”
 he told his senior, putting on his hat; and something of the wonted
fighting elation came upon him as he went down the stairs. He was right
in his supposition. They had decided about it, and they were waiting,
in a group that made every effort to look casual, to tell him when he
arrived.

They had delegated what Horace Williams called “the job” to Mr
Farquharson, and he was actually struggling with the preliminaries of
it, when Bingham, uncomfortable under the curious quietude of the young
fellow’s attention, burst out with the whole thing.

“The fact is, Murchison, you can’t poll the vote. There’s no man in the
Riding we’d be better pleased to send to the House; but we’ve got to win
this election, and we can’t win it with you.”

“You think you can’t?” said Lorne.

“You see, old man,” Horace Williams put in, “you didn’t get rid of that
save-the-Empire-or-die scheme of yours soon enough. People got to think
you meant something by it.”

“I shall never get rid of it,” Lorne returned simply, and the others
looked at one another.

“The popular idea seems to be,” said Mr Farquharson judicially, “that
you would not hesitate to put Canada to some material loss, or at least
to postpone her development in various important directions, for the
sake of the imperial connection.”

“Wasn’t that,” Lorne asked him, “what, six months ago, you were all
prepared to do?”

“Oh, no,” said Bingham, with the air of repudiating for everybody
concerned. “Not for a cent. We were willing at one time to work it
for what is was worth, but it never was worth that, and if you’d had a
little more experience, Murchison, you’d have realized it.”

“That’s right, Lorne,” contributed Horace Williams. “Experience--that’s
all you want. You’ve got everything else, and a darned sight more. We’ll
get you there, all in good time. But this time--”

“You want me to step down and out,” said Lorne.

“That’s for you to say,” Bingham told him. “We can nominate you again
all right, but we’re afraid we can’t get you the convention. Young and
Windle have been working like moles for the past ten days--”

“For Carter?” interrupted Lorne: “Carter, of course.”

They nodded. Carter stood the admitted fact.

“I’m sorry it’s Carter,” said Lorne thoughtfully. “However--” And he
dropped, staring before him, into silence. The others eyed him from
serious, underhung faces. Horace Williams, with an obvious effort, got
up and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Brace up, old chap,” he said. “You made a blame good fight for us, and
we’ll do the same for you another day.”

“However, gentlemen,” the young man gathered himself up to say, “I
believe I understand the situation. You are my friends and this is your
advice. We must save the seat. I’ll see Carter. If I can get anything
out of him to make me think he’ll go straight on the scheme to save the
Empire”--he smiled faintly--“when it comes to a vote, I’ll withdraw in
his favour at the convention. Horace here will think up something for
me--any old lie will do, I suppose? In any case, of course, I withdraw.”

He took his hat, and they all got up, startled a little at the quick
and simple close of the difficult scene they had anticipated. Horace
Williams offered his hand.

“Shake, Lorne,” he said, and the other two, coming nearer, followed his
example.

“Why, yes,” said Lorne.

He left them with a brief excuse, and they stood together in a moment’s
silence, three practical politicians who had delivered themselves from a
dangerous network involving higher things.

“Dash these heart-to-heart talks,” said Bingham irritably, “it’s the
only thing to do, but why the devil didn’t he want something out of it?
I had that Registrarship in my inside pocket.”

“If anybody likes to kick me round the room,” remarked Horace Williams
with depression, “I have no very strong objection.”

“And now,” Mr Farquharson said with a sigh, “we understand it’s got
to be Carter. I suppose I’m too old a man to do jockey for a
three-year-old, but I own I’ve enjoyed the ride.”

Lorne Murchison went out into the companionship of Main Street, the new
check in his fortunes hanging before him. We may imagine that it hung
heavily; we may suppose that it cut off the view. As Bingham would have
said, he was “up against it” and that, when one is confidently treading
the straight path to accomplishment, is a dazing experience. He was
up against it, yet already he had recoiled far enough to consider it;
already he was adapting his heart, his nerves, and his future to it.
His heart took it greatly, told him he had not yet force enough for the
business he had aspired to, but gave him a secret assurance. Another
time he would find more strength and show more cunning; he would not
disdain the tools of diplomacy and desirability, he would dream no more
of short cuts in great political departures. His heart bowed to its
sorry education and took counsel with him, bidding him be of good
courage and push on. He was up against it, but he would get round it,
and there on the other side lay the same wide prospect, with the
Idea shining high. At one point he faltered, but that was a matter of
expediency rather than of courage. He searched and selected, as he went
along the street, among phrases that would convey his disaster to Dora
Milburn.

Just at that point, the turning to his own office, he felt it hard luck
that Alfred Hesketh should meet and want a word with him. Hesketh had
become tolerable only when other things were equal. Lorne had not seen
him since the night of his election, when his felicitations had seemed
to stand for very little one way or another. His manner now was more
important charged with other considerations. Lorne waited on the
word, uncomfortably putting off the necessity of coming out with his
misfortune.

“I haven’t come across you, Murchison, but you’ve had my sympathy, I
needn’t say, all this time. A man can’t go into politics with gloves
on, there’s no doubt about that. Though mind you, I never for a moment
believed that you let yourself in personally. I mean, I’ve held you all
through, above the faintest suspicion.”

“Have you?” said Lorne. “Well, I suppose I ought to be grateful.”

“Oh, I have--I assure you! But give me a disputed election for the
revelation of a rotten state of things--eh?”

“It does show up pretty low, doesn’t it?”

“However, upon my word, I don’t know whether it’s any better in England.
At bottom we’ve got a lower class to deal with, you know. I’m
beginning to have a great respect for the electorate of this country,
Murchison--not necessarily the methods, but the rank and file of the
people. They know what they want, and they’re going to have it.”

“Yes,” said Lorne, “I guess they are.”

“And that brings me to my news, old man. I’ve given the matter a lot of
time and a lot of consideration, and I’ve decided that I can’t do better
than drive in a stake for myself in this new country of yours.”

“It isn’t so very new,” Lorne told him, in rather dull response, “but I
expect that’s a pretty good line to take. Why, yes--first rate.”

“As to the line,” Hesketh went on, weightily, leading the way through
an encumbering group of farmers at a corner, “I’ve selected that, too.
Traction-engines. Milburn has never built them yet, but he says the
opportunity is ripe--”

“Milburn!” Lorne wheeled sharply.

“My future partner. He was planning extensions just as I came along, a
fortunate moment, I hope it will prove, for us both. I’d like to go
into it with you, some time when you have leisure--it’s a scheme of
extraordinary promise. By the way, there’s an idea in it that ought to
appeal to you--driving the force that’s to subdue this wilderness of
yours.”

“When you’ve lived here for a while,” said Lorne, painfully preoccupied,
“you’ll think it quite civilized. So you’re going in with Milburn?”

“Oh, I’m proud of it already! I shall make a good Canadian, I trust. And
as good an imperialist,” he added, “as is consistent with the claims of
my adopted country.”

“That seems to be the popular view,” said Lorne.

“And a very reasonable view, too. But I’m not going to embark on that
with you, old fellow--you shan’t draw me in. I know where you are on
that subject.”

“So do I--I’m stranded. But it’s all right--the subject isn’t,” Lorne
said quietly; and Hesketh’s exclamations and inquiries brought out the
morning’s reverse. The young Englishman was cordially sorry, full
of concern and personal disappointment, abandoning his own absorbing
affairs, and devoting his whole attention to the unfortunate exigency
which Lorne dragged out of his breast, in pure manfulness, to lay before
him.

However, they came to the end of it, arriving at the same time at
the door which led up the stairs to the office of Fulke, Warner, and
Murchison.

“Thank you,” said Lorne. ‘“Thank you. Oh, I dare say it will come all
right in the course of time. You return to England, I suppose--or do
you?--before you go in with Milburn?”

“I sail next week,” said Hesketh, and a great relief shot into the face
of his companion. “I have a good deal to see to over there. I shan’t
get back much before June, I fancy. And--I must tell you--I am doing the
thing very thoroughly. This business of naturalizing myself, I mean. I
am going to marry that very charming girl--a great friend of yours, by
the way, I know her to be--Miss Milburn.”

For accepting the strokes of fate we have curiously trivial
demonstrations. Lorne met Hesketh’s eye with the steadiness of a lion’s
in his own; the unusual thing he did was to take his hands out of his
pockets and let his arms hang loosely by his side. It was as tragic a
gesture of helplessness as if he had flung them above his head.

“Dora is going to marry you?”

“I believe she will do me that honour. And I consider it an honour.
Miss Milburn will compare with any English girl I ever met. But I
half expected you to congratulate me. I know she wrote to you this
morning--you were one of the first.”

“I shall probably find the letter,” said Lorne mechanically, “when I go
home.”

He still eyed Hesketh narrowly, as if he had somewhere concealed about
him the explanation of this final bitter circumstance. He had a desire
not to leave him, to stand and parley--to go upstairs to the office
would be to plunge into the gulf. He held back from that and leaned
against the door frame, crossing his arms and looking over into the
market-place for subjects to postpone Hesketh’s departure. They talked
of various matters in sight, Hesketh showing the zest of his newly
determined citizenship in every observation--the extension of the
electric tramway, the pulling down of the old Fire Hall. In one
consciousness Lorne made concise and relevant remarks; in another he sat
in a spinning dark world and waited for the crash.

It seemed to come when Hesketh said, preparing to go, “I’ll tell Miss
Milburn I saw you. I suppose this change in your political prospects
won’t affect your professional plans in any way you’ll stick on here, at
the Bar?”

It was the very shock of calamity, and for the instant he could see
nothing in the night of it but one far avenue of escape, a possibility
he had never thought of seriously until that moment. The conception
seemed to form itself on his lips, to be involuntary.

“I don’t know. A college friend has been pressing me for some time to
join him in Milwaukee. He offers me plenty of work, and I am thinking
seriously of closing with him.”

“Go over to the United States? You can’t mean that!”

“Oh yes--it’s the next best thing!”

Hesketh’s face assumed a gravity, a look of feeling and of remonstrance.
He came a step nearer and put a hand on his companion’s arm.

“Come now, Murchison,” he said, “I ask you--is this a time to be
thinking of chucking the Empire?”

Lorne moved farther into the passage with an abruptness which left his
interlocutor staring. He stood there for a moment in silence, and then
turned to mount the stair with a reply which a passing dray happily
prevented from reaching Hesketh’s ears.

“No, damn you,” he said. “It’s not!”

I cannot let him finish on that uncontrolled phrase, though it will be
acknowledged that his provocation was great. Nor must we leave him in
heavy captivity to the thought of oblivion in the unregarding welter
of the near republic, of plunging into more strenuous activities and
abandoning his ideal, in queer inverted analogy to the refuging of weak
women in a convent. We know that his ideal was strong enough to reassert
itself, under a keen irony of suggestion, in the very depth of his
overwhelming: and the thing that could rise in him at that black moment
may be trusted, perhaps, to reclaim his fortitude and reconsecrate his
energy when these things come again into the full current of his life.
The illness that, after two or three lagging days, brought him its
merciful physical distraction was laid in the general understanding
at the door of his political disappointment; and, among a crowd
of sympathizers confined to no party, Horace Williams, as his wife
expressed it, was pretty nearly wild during its progress. The power of
the press is regrettably small in such emergencies, but what restoration
it had Horace anxiously administered; the Express published a daily
bulletin. The second election passed only half-noticed by the Murchison
family; Carter very nearly re-established the Liberal majority. The
Dominion dwelt upon this repeated demonstration of the strength of
Reform principles in South Fox, and Mrs Murchison said they were welcome
to Carter.

Many will sympathize with Mrs Murchison at this point, I hope, and
regret to abandon her in such equivocal approval of the circumstances
which have arisen round her. Too anxiously occupied at home to take her
share in the general pleasant sensation of Dr Drummond’s marriage, she
was compelled to give it a hurried consideration and a sanction which
was practically wrested from her. She could not be clear as to the
course of events that led to it, nor entirely satisfied, as she said,
about the ins and outs of the affair; this although she felt she could
be clearer, and possibly had better grounds for being satisfied, than
other people. As to Advena’s simple statement that Miss Cameron had
made a second choice of the Doctor, changing her mind, as far as Mrs
Murchison could see, without rhyme or reason, that Mrs Murchison took
leave to find a very poor explanation. Advena’s own behaviour toward
the rejection is one of the things which her mother declares, probably
truly, that she never will understand. To pick up a man in the actual
fling of being thrown over, will never, in Mrs Murchison’s eyes,
constitute a decorous proceeding. I suppose she thinks the creature
might have been made to wait at least until he had found his feet. She
professes to cherish no antagonism to her future son-in-law on this
account, although, as she says, it’s a queer way to come into a family;
and she makes no secret of her belief that Miss Cameron showed excellent
judgement in doing as she did, however that far-seeing woman came to
have the opportunity.

Hesketh had sailed before Lorne left his room, to return in June to
those privileges and prospects of citizenship which he so eminently
deserves to enjoy. When her brother’s convalescence and departure for
Florida had untied her tongue, Stella widely proclaimed her opinion that
Mr Hesketh’s engagement to Miss Milburn was the most suitable thing that
could be imagined or desired. We know the youngest Miss Murchison to be
inclined to impulsive views; but it would be safe, I think, to follow
her here. Now that the question no longer circles in the actual vortex
of Elgin politics Mr Octavius Milburn’s attitude toward the
conditions of imperial connection has become almost as mellow as
ever. Circumstances may arise any day, however, to stir up that latent
bitterness which is so potential in him: and then I fear there will be
no restraining him from again attacking Wallingham in the papers.

Henry Cruickshank, growing old in his eminence and less secure, perhaps,
in the increasing conflict of loud voices, of his own grasp of the
ultimate best, fearing too, no doubt, the approach of that cynicism
which, moral or immoral, is the real hoar of age, wrote to young
Murchison while he was still examining the problems of the United States
with the half-heart of the alien, and offered him a partnership. The
terms were so simple and advantageous as only to be explicable on the
grounds I have mentioned, though no phrase suggested them in the brief
formulas of the letter, in which one is tempted to find the individual
parallel of certain propositions of a great government also growing old.
The offer was accepted, not without emotion, and there, too, it would
be good to trace the parallel, were we permitted; but for that it is too
soon, or perhaps it is too late. Here, for Lorne and for his country,
we lose the thread of destiny. The shuttles fly, weaving the will of the
nations, with a skein for ever dipped again; and he goes forth to his
share in the task among those by whose hand and direction the pattern
and the colours will be made.


END





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