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Title: The Imperialist

Author: Sara Jeannette Duncan
        a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5301]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 25, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IMPERIALIST ***




This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.





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

The Imperialist

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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