THE IMPERIALIST
By Sara Jeannette Duncan, 1861-1922 (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
1904
CONTENTS
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.