It was the talk of the town, the pride of the market-place, Lorne Murchison’s having been selected to accompany what was known as the Cruickshank deputation to England. The general spirit of congratulation was corrected by a tendency to assert it another proof of sagacity on the chairman’s part; Elgin wouldn’t be too flattered; Lawyer Cruickshank couldn’t have done better. You may be sure the Express was well ahead with it. “Honour to Our Young Fellow Townsman. A Well-Merited Compliment,” and Rawlins was round promptly next morning to glean further particulars. He found only Mrs Murchison, on a stepladder tying up the clematis that climbed about the verandah, and she told him a little about clematis and a good deal about the inconvenience of having to abandon superintending the spring cleaning in order to get Lorne ready to go to the Old Country at such short notice, but nothing he could put in the paper. Lorne, sought at the office, was hardly more communicative. Mr Williams himself dropped in there. He said the Express would now have a personal interest in the object of the deputation, and proposed to strike out a broad line, a broader line than ever.
“We’ve got into the way of taking it for granted,” said Mr Williams, “that the subsidy idea is a kind of mediaeval idea. Raise a big enough shout and you get things taken for granted in economics for a long while. Conditions keep changing, right along, all the time, and presently you’ve got to reconsider. There ain’t any sort of ultimate truth in the finest economic position, my son; not any at all.”
“We’ll subsidize over here, right enough,” said Lorne.
“That’s the idea—that’s the prevailing idea, just now. But lots of people think different—more than you’d imagine. I was talking to old man Milburn just now—he’s dead against it. ‘Government has no business,’ he said, ‘to apply the taxes in the interests of any company. It oughtn’t to know how to spell “subsidy.” If the trade was there it would get itself carried,’ he said.”
“Well, that surprises me,” said Lorne.
“Surprised me, too. But I was on the spot with him; just thought of it in time. ‘Well, now, Mr Milburn,’ I said, ‘you’ve changed your mind. Thought that was a thing you Conservatives never did,’ I said. ‘We don’t—I haven’t,’ he said. ‘What d’ye mean? Twenty-five years ago,’ I said, ‘when you were considering whether you’d start the Milburn Boiler Works here or in Hamilton, Hamilton offered you a free site, and Elgin offered you a free site and a dam for your water power. You took the biggest subsidy an’ came here,’ I said.”
Lorne laughed: “What did he say to that?”
“Hadn’t a word. ‘I guess it’s up to me,’ he said. Then he turned round and came back. ‘Hold on, Williams; he said. ‘You know so much already about my boiler works, it wouldn’t be much trouble for you to write out an account of them from the beginning, would it? Working in the last quarter of a century of the town’s progress, you know, and all that. Come round to the office tomorrow, and I’ll give you some pointers.’ And he fixed up a two-column ad right away. He was afraid I’d round on him, I suppose, if I caught him saying anything more about the immorality of subsidies.”
“He won’t say anything more.”
“Probably not. Milburn hasn’t got much of a political conscience, but he’s got a sense of what’s silly. Well, now, I expect you want all the time there is.”
Mr Williams removed himself from the edge of the table, which was strewn with maps and bluebooks, printed official, and typewritten demi-official papers.
“Give ‘em a notion of those Assiniboian wheat acres, my boy, and the ranch country we’ve got; tell ‘em about the future of quick passage and cold storage. Get ‘em a little ashamed to have made so many fortunes for Yankee beef combines; persuade ‘em the cheapest market has a funny way of getting the dearest price in the end. Give it ‘em, Lorne, hot and cold and fricasseed. The Express will back you up.”
He slapped his young friend’s shoulder, who seemed occupied with matters that prevented his at once feeling the value of this assurance. “Bye-bye,” said Mr Williams. “See you again before you start.”
“Oh, of course!” Lorne replied. “I’ll—I’ll come round. By the way, Williams, Mr Milburn didn’t say anything—anything about me in connection with this business? Didn’t mention, I suppose, what he thought about my going?”
“Not a word, my boy! He was away up in abstract principles; he generally is. Bye-bye.”
“It’s gone to his head a little bit—only natural,” Horace reflected as he went down the stairs. “He’s probably just feeding on what folks think of it. As if it mattered a pin’s head what Octavius Milburn thinks or don’t think!”
Lorne, however, left alone with his customs returns and his immigration reports, sat still, attaching a weight quite out of comparison with a pin’s head to Mr Milburn’s opinion. He turned it over and over, instead of the tabulated figures that were his business: he had to show himself his way to the conclusion that such a thing could not matter seriously in the end, since Milburn hadn’t a dollar involved—it would be different if he were a shareholder in the Maple Line. He wished heartily, nevertheless, that he could demonstrate a special advantage to boiler-makers in competitive freights with New York. What did they import, confound them! Pig-iron? Plates and rivets? Fortunately he was in a position to get at the facts, and he got at them with an interest of even greater intensity than he had shown to the whole question since ten that morning. Even now, the unprejudiced observer, turning up the literature connected with the Cruickshank deputation, may notice a stress laid upon the advantages to Canadian importers of ore in certain stages of manufacture which may strike him as slightly, very slightly, special. Of course there are a good many of them in the country. So that Mr Horace Williams was justified to some extent in his kindly observation upon the excusable egotism of youth. Two or three letters, however, came in while Lorne was considering the relation of plates and rivets to the objects of his deputation. They were all congratulatory; one was from the chairman of the Liberal Association at its headquarters in Toronto. Lorne glanced at them and stowed them away in his pocket. He would read them when he got home, when it would be a pleasure to hand them over to his mother. She was making a collection of them.
He had a happy perception that same evening that Mr Milburn’s position was not, after all, finally and invincibly taken against the deputation and everything—everybody—concerned with it. He met that gentleman at his own garden gate. Octavius paused in his exit, to hold it open for young Murchison, thus even assisting the act of entry, a thing which thrilled Lorne sweetly enough when he had time to ponder its possible significance. Alas! the significance that lovers find! Lorne read a world in the behaviour of Dora’s father in holding the gate open. He saw political principle put aside in his favour, and social position forgotten in kindness to him. He saw the gravest, sincerest appreciation of his recent success, which he took as humbly as a dog will take a bone; he read a fatherly thought at which his pulses bounded in an arrogance of triumph, and his heart rose to ask its trust. And Octavius Milburn had held the gate open because it was more convenient to hold it open than to leave it open. He had not a political view in the world that was calculated to affect his attitude toward a practical matter; and his opinion of Lorne was quite uncomplicated: he thought him a very likely young fellow. Milburn himself, in the Elgin way, preferred to see no great significance of this sort anywhere. Young people were young people; it was natural enough that they should like each other’s society. They, the Milburns, were very glad to see Mr Murchison, very glad indeed. It was frequent matter for veiled humorous reference at the table that he had been to call again, at which Dora would look very stiff and dignified, and have to be coaxed back into the conversation. As to anything serious, there was no hurry; plenty of time to think of that. Such matters dwelt under the horizon; there was no need to scan them closely; and Mr Milburn went his way, conscious of nothing more than a comfortable gratification that Dora, so far as the young men were concerned, seemed as popular as other girls.
Dora was not in the drawing-room. Young ladies in Elgin had always to be summoned from somewhere. For all the Filkin instinct for the conservation of polite tradition, Dora was probably reading the Toronto society weekly—illustrated, with correspondents all over the Province—on the back verandah and, but for the irruption of a visitor, would probably not have entered the formal apartment of the house at all that evening. Drawing-rooms in Elgin had their prescribed uses—to receive in, to practise in, and for the last sad entertainment of the dead, when the furniture was disarranged to accommodate the trestles; but the common business of life went on outside them, even among prosperous people, the survival, perhaps, of a habit based upon thrift. The shutters were opened when Lorne entered, to let in the spring twilight, and the servant pulled a chair into its proper relation with the room as she went out.
Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin both came in before Dora did. Lorne found their conversation enchanting, though it was mostly about the difficulty of keeping the lawn tidy; they had had so much rain. Mrs Milburn assured him kindly that there was not such another lawn as his father’s in Elgin. How Mr Murchison managed to have it looking so nice always she could not think. Only yesterday she and Mr Milburn had stopped to admire it as they passed.
“Spring is always a beautiful time in Elgin,” she remarked. “There are so many pretty houses here, each standing in its own grounds. Nothing very grand, as I tell my friend, Miss Cham, from Buffalo where the residences are, of course, on quite a different scale; but grandeur isn’t everything, is it?”
“No, indeed,” said Lorne.
“But you will be leaving for Great Britain very soon now, Mr Murchison,” said Miss Filkin. “Leaving Elgin and all its beauties! And I dare say you won’t think of them once again till you get back!”
“I hope I shall not be so busy as that, Miss Filkin.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure Mr Murchison won’t forget his native town altogether,” said Mrs Milburn, “though perhaps he won’t like it so well after seeing dear old England!”
“I expect,” said Lorne simply, “to like it better.”
“Well, of course, we shall all be pleased if you say that, Mr Murchison,” Mrs Milburn replied graciously. “We shall feel quite complimented. But I’m afraid you will find a great deal to criticize when you come back—that is, if you go at all into society over there. I always say there can be nothing like good English society.”
“I want to attend a sitting of the House,” Lorne said. “I hope I shall have time for that. I want to see those fellows handling their public business. I don’t believe I shall find our men so far behind, for point of view and grasp and dispatch. Of course there’s always Wallingham to make a standard for us all. But they haven’t got so many Wallinghams.”
“Wasn’t it Wallingham, Louisa, that Mr Milburn was saying at breakfast was such a dangerous man? So able, he said, but dangerous. Something to do with the tariff.”
“Oh?” said Lorne, and he said no more, for at that moment Dora came in. She came in looking very straight and graceful and composed. Her personal note was carried out in her pretty clothes, which hung and “sat” upon her like the rhythm of verses; they could fall no other way. She had in every movement the definite accent of young ladyhood; she was very much aware of herself, of the situation, and of her value in it, a setting for herself she saw it, and saw it truly. No one, from the moment she entered the room, looked at anything else.
“Oh, Mr Murchison,” she said. “How do you do? Mother, do you mind if I open the window? It’s quite warm out of doors—regular summer.”
Lorne sprang to open the window, while Miss Filkin, murmuring that it had been a beautiful day, moved a little farther from it.
“Oh, please don’t trouble, Mr Murchison; thank you very much!” Miss Milburn continued, and subsided on a sofa. “Have you been playing tennis this week?”
Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only once.
“The courts aren’t a bit in good order. They want about a week’s rolling. The balls get up anywhere,” said Dora.
“Lawn tennis,” Mrs Milburn asserted herself, “is a delightful exercise. I hope it will never go out of fashion; but that is what we used to say of croquet, and it has gone out and come in again.”
Lorne listened to this with deference; there was a hint of patience in the regard Dora turned upon her mother. Mrs Milburn continued to dilate upon lawn tennis, dealt lightly with badminton, and brought the conversation round with a graceful sweep to canoeing. Dora’s attitude before she had done became slightly permissive, but Mrs Milburn held on till she had accomplished her conception of conduct for the occasion; then she remembered a meeting in the schoolhouse.
“We are to have an address by an Indian bishop,” she told them. “He is on his way to England by China and Japan, and is staying with our dear rector, Mr Murchison. Such a treat I expect it will be.”
“What I am dying to know,” said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, “is whether he is black or white!”
Mrs Milburn then left the room, and shortly afterward Miss Filkin thought she could not miss the bishop either, conveying the feeling that a bishop was a bishop, of whatever colour. She stayed three minutes longer than Mrs Milburn, but she went. The Filkin tradition, though strong, could not hold out entirely against the unwritten laws, the silently claimed privileges, of youth in Elgin. It made its pretence and vanished.
Even as the door closed the two that were left looked at one another with a new significance. A simpler relation established itself between them and controlled all that surrounded them; the very twilight seemed conscious with it; the chairs and tables stood in attentive harmony.
“You know,” said Dora, “I hate your going, Lorne!”
She did indeed seem moved, about the mouth, to discontent. There was some little injury in the way she swung her foot.
“I was hoping Mr Fulke wouldn’t get better in time; I was truly!”
The gratitude in young Murchison’s eyes should have been dear to her. I don’t know whether she saw it; but she must have been aware that she was saying what touched him, making her point.
“Oh, it’s a good thing to go, Dora.”
“A good thing for you! And the regatta coming off the first week in June, and a whole crowd coming from Toronto for it. There isn’t another person in town I care to canoe with, Lorne, you know perfectly well!”
“I’m awfully sorry!” said Lorne. “I wish—”
“Oh, I’m GOING, I believe. Stephen Stuart has written from Toronto, and asked me to sail with him. I haven’t told Mother, but he’s my second cousin, so I suppose she won’t make a fuss.”
The young man’s face clouded; seeing which she relented. “Oh, of course, I’m glad you’re going, really,” she assured him. “And we’ll all be proud to be acquainted with such a distinguished gentleman when you get back. Do you think you’ll see the King? You might, you know, in London.”
“I’ll see him if he’s visible,” laughed Lorne. “That would be something to tell your mother, wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid we won’t be doing business with His Majesty.”
“I expect you’ll have the loveliest time you ever had in all your life. Do you think you’ll be asked out much, Lorne?”
“I can’t imagine who would ask me. We’ll get off easy if the street boys don’t shout: ‘What price Canucks?’ at us! But I’ll see England, Dora; I’ll feel England, eat and drink and sleep and live in England, for a little while. Isn’t the very name great? I’ll be a better man for going, till I die. We’re all right out here, but we’re young and thin and weedy. They didn’t grow so fast in England, to begin with, and now they’re rich with character and strong with conduct and hoary with ideals. I’ve been reading up the history of our political relations with England. It’s astonishing what we’ve stuck to her through, but you can’t help seeing why—it’s for the moral advantage. Way down at the bottom, that’s what it is. We have the sense to want all we can get of that sort of thing. They’ve developed the finest human product there is, the cleanest, the most disinterested, and we want to keep up the relationship—it’s important. Their talk about the value of their protection doesn’t take in the situation as it is now. Who would touch us if we were running our own show?”
“I don’t believe they are a bit better than we are,” replied Miss Milburn. “I’m sure I haven’t much opinion of the Englishmen that come out here. They don’t think anything of getting into debt, and as often as not they drink, and they never know enough to—to come in out of the rain. But, Lorne—”
“Yes, but we’re very apt to get the failures. The fellows their folks give five or six hundred pounds to and tell them they’re not expected back till they’re making a living. The best men find their level somewhere else, along recognized channels. Lord knows we don’t want them—this country’s for immigrants. We’re manufacturing our own gentlemen quite fast enough for the demand.”
“I should think we were! Why, Lorne, Canadians—nice Canadians are just as gentlemanly as they can be! They’ll compare with anybody. Perhaps Americans have got more style:” she weighed the matter; “but Canadians are much better form, I think. But, Lorne, how perfectly dear of you to send me those roses. I wore them, and nobody there had such beauties. All the girls wanted to know where I got them, but I only told Lily, just to make her feel a pig for not having asked you—my very greatest friend! She just about apologized—told me she wanted to ask about twenty more people, but her mother wouldn’t let her. They’ve lost an uncle or something lately, and if it hadn’t been for Clara Sims staying with them they wouldn’t have been giving anything.”
“I’ll try to survive not having been asked. But I’m glad you wore the roses, Dora.”
“I dropped one, and Phil Carter wanted to keep it. He’s so silly!”
“Did you—did you let him keep it?”
“Lorne Murchison! Do you think I’d let any man keep a rose I’d been wearing?”
He looked at her, suddenly emboldened. “I don’t know about roses, Dora, but pansies—those are awfully nice ones in your dress. I’m very fond of pansies; couldn’t you spare me one? I wouldn’t ask for a rose, but a pansy—”
His eyes were more ardent than what he found to say. Beneath them Dora grew delicately pink. The pansies drooped a little; she put her slender fingers under one, and lifted its petals.
“It’s too faded for your buttonhole,” she said.
“It needn’t stay in my buttonhole. I know lots of other places!” he begged.
Dora considered the pansy again, then she pulled it slowly out, and the young man got up and went over to her, proffering the lapel of his coat.
“It spoils the bunch,” she said prettily. “If I give you this you will have to give me something to take its place.”
“I will,” said Lorne.
“I know it will be something better,” said Dora, and there was a little effort in her composure. “You send people such beautiful flowers, Lorne.”
She rose beside him as she spoke, graceful and fair, to fasten it in; and it was his hand that shook.
“Then may I choose it?” said Lorne. “And will you wear it?”
“I suppose you may. Why are you—why do you—Oh, Lorne, stand still!”
“I’ll give you, you sweet girl, my whole heart!” he said in the vague tender knowledge that he offered her a garden, where she had but to walk, and smile, to bring about her unimaginable blooms.
They sat talking on the verandah in the close of the May evening, Mr and Mrs Murchison. The Plummer Place was the Murchison Place in the town’s mouth now, and that was only fair; the Murchisons had overstamped the Plummers. It lay about them like a map of their lives: the big horse chestnut stood again in flower to lighten the spring dusk for them, as it had done faithfully for thirty years. John was no longer in his shirt-sleeves; the growing authority of his family had long prescribed a black alpaca coat. He smoked his meerschaum with the same old deliberation, however, holding it by the bowl as considerately as he held its original, which lasted him fifteen years. A great deal of John Murchison’s character was there, in the way he held his pipe, his gentleness and patience, even the justice and repose and quiet strength of his nature. He smoked and read the paper the unfailing double solace of his evenings. I should have said that it was Mrs Murchison who talked. She had the advantage of a free mind, only subconsciously occupied with her white wool and agile needles; and John had frequently to choose between her observations and the politics of the day.
“You saw Lorne’s letter this morning, Father?”
John took his pipe out of his mouth. “Yes,” he said.
“He seems tremendously taken up with Wallingham. It was all Wallingham, from one end to the other.”
“It’s not remarkable,” said John Murchison, patiently.
“You’d think he had nothing else to write about. There was that reception at Lord What-you-may-call-him’s, the Canadian Commissioner’s, when the Prince and Princess of Wales came, and brought their family. I’d like to have heard something more about that than just that he was there. He might have noticed what the children had on. Now that Abby’s family is coming about her I seem to have my hands as full of children’s clothes as ever I had. Abby seems to think there’s nothing like my old patterns; I’m sure I’m sick of the sight of them!”
Mr Murchison refolded his newspaper, took his pipe once more from his mouth, and said nothing.
“John, put down that paper! I declare it’s enough to drive anybody crazy! Now look at that boy walking across the lawn. He does it every night, delivering the Express, and you take no more notice! He’s wearing a regular path!”
“Sonny,” said Mr Murchison, as the urchin approached, “you mustn’t walk across the grass.”
“Much good that will do!” remarked Mrs Murchison. “I’d teach him to walk across the grass, if—if it were my business. Boy—isn’t your name Willie Parker? Then it was your mother I promised the coat and the other things to, and you’ll find them ready there, just inside the hall door. They’ll make down very well for you, but you can tell her from me that she’d better double-seam them, for the stuff’s apt to ravel. And attend to what Mr Murchison says; go out by the gravel—what do you suppose it’s there for?”
Mrs Murchison readjusted her glasses, and turned another row of the tiny sock. “I must say it’s a pleasure to have the lawn neat and green,” she said, with a sigh. “Never did I expect to see the day it would be anything but chickweed and dandelions. We’ve a great deal to be thankful for, and all our children spared to us, too. John,” she continued, casting a shrewd glance over her needles at nothing in particular; “do you suppose anything was settled between Lorne and Dora Milburn before he Started?”
“He said nothing to me about it.”
“Oh, well, very likely he wouldn’t. Young people keep such a tremendous lot to themselves nowadays. But it’s my belief they’ve come to an understanding.”
“Lily might do worse,” said John Murchison, judicially.
“I should think Dora might do worse! I don’t know where she’s going to do better! The most promising young man in Elgin, well brought up, well educated, well started in a profession! There’s not a young fellow in this town to compare with Lorne, and perfectly well you know it, John. Might do worse! But that’s you all over. Belittle your own belongings!”
Mr Murchison smiled in amused tolerance. “They’ve always got you to blow their trumpet, Mother,” he replied.
“And more than me. You ought to hear Dr Drummond about Lorne! He says that if the English Government starts that line of boats to Halifax the country will owe it to him, much more than to Cruickshank, or anybody else.”
“Dr Drummond likes to talk,” said John Murchison.
“Lorne’s keeping his end up all right,” remarked Stella, jumping off her bicycle in time to hear what her mother said. “It’s great, that old Wallingham asking him to dinner. And haven’t I just been spreading it!”
“Where have you been, Stella?” asked Mrs Murchison.
“Oh, only over to the Milburns’. Dora asked me to come and show her the new flower-stitch for table centres. Dora’s suddenly taken to fancy work. She’s started a lot—a lot too much!” Stella added gloomily.
“If Dora likes to do fancy work I don’t see why anybody should want to stop her,” remarked Mrs Murchison, with a meaning glance at her husband.
“I suppose she thinks she’s going to get Lorne,” said Stella. Her resentment was only half-serious, but the note was there.
“What put that into your head?” asked her mother.
“Oh, well, anybody can see that he’s devoted to her, and has been for ages, and it isn’t as if Lorne was one to HAVE girlfriends; she’s absolutely the only thing he’s ever looked at twice. She hasn’t got a ring, that’s true, but it would be just like her to want him to get it in England. And I know they correspond. She doesn’t make any secret of it.”
“Oh, I dare say! Other people have eyes in their head as well as you, Stella,” said Mrs Murchison, stooping for her ball. “But there’s no need to take things for granted at such a rate. And, above all, you’re not to go TALKING, remember!”
“Well, if you think Dora Milburn’s good enough,” returned Lorne’s youngest sister in threatening accents, “it’s more than I do, that’s all. Hello, Miss Murchison!” she continued, as Advena appeared. “You’re looking ‘xtremely dinky-dink. Expecting his reverence?”
Advena made no further reply than a look of scornful amusement, which Stella, bicycling forth again, received in the back of her head.
“Father,” said Mrs Murchison, “if you had taken any share in the bringing up of this family, Stella ought to have her ears boxed this minute!”
“We’ll have to box them,” said Mr Murchison, “when she comes back.” Advena had retreated into the house. “IS she expecting his reverence?” asked her father with a twinkle.
“Don’t ask me! I’m sure it’s more than I can tell you. It’s a mystery to me, that matter, altogether. I’ve known him come three evenings in a week and not again for a month of Sundays. And when he does come there they sit, talking about their books and their authors; you’d think the world had nothing else in it! I know, for I’ve heard them, hard at it, there in the library. Books and authors won’t keep their house or look after their family for them; I can tell them that, if it does come to anything, which I hope it won’t.”
“Finlay’s fine in the pulpit,” said John Murchison cautiously.
“Oh, the man’s well enough; it’s him I’m sorry for. I don’t call Advena fitted to be a wife, and last of all a minister’s. Abby was a treasure for any man to get, and Stella won’t turn out at all badly; she’s taking hold very well for her age. But Advena simply hasn’t got it in her, and that’s all there is to say about it.” Mrs Murchison pulled her needles out right side out with finality. “I don’t deny the girl’s talented in her own way, but it’s no way to marry on. She’d much better make up her mind just to be a happy independent old maid; any woman might do worse. And take no responsibilities.”
“There would always be you, Mother, for them to fall back on.” It was as near as John Murchison ever got to flattery.
“No thank you, then! I’ve brought up six of my own, as well as I was able, which isn’t saying much, and a hard life I’ve had of it. Now I’m done with it; they’ll have to find somebody else to fall back on. If they get themselves into such a mess”—Mrs Murchison stopped to laugh with sincere enjoyment—“they needn’t look to me to get them out.”
“I guess you’d have a hand, Mother.”
“Not I. But the man isn’t thinking of any such folly. What do you suppose his salary is?”
“Eight hundred and fifty dollars a year. They raised it last month.”
“And how far would Advena be able to make that go, with servants getting the money they do and expecting the washing put out as a matter of course? Do you remember Eliza, John, that we had when we were first married? Seven dollars a month she got; she would split wood at a pinch, and I’ve never had one since that could do up shirts like her. Three years and a half she was with me, and did everything, everything I didn’t do. But that was management, and Advena’s no manager. It would be me that would tell him, if I had the chance. Then he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. But I don’t think he has any such idea.”
“Advena,” pronounced Mr Murchison, “might do worse.”
“Well, I don’t know whether she might. The creature is well enough to preach before a congregation. But what she can see in him out of the pulpit is more than I know. A great gawk of a fellow, with eyes that always look as if he were in the middle of next week! He may be able to talk to Advena, but he’s no hand at general conversation; I know he finds precious little to say to me. But he’s got no such notion. He comes here because, being human, he’s got to open his mouth some time or other, I suppose; but it’s my opinion he has neither Advena nor anybody else in his mind’s eye at present. He doesn’t go the right way about it.”
“H’m!” said John Murchison.
“He brought her a book the last time he came—what do you think the name of it was? The something or other of Plato! Do you call that a natural gift from a young man who is thinking seriously of a girl? Besides, if I know anything about Plato he was a Greek heathen, and no writer for a Presbyterian minister to go lending around. I’d Plato him to the rightabout if it was me!”
“She might read worse than Plato,” remarked John.
“Oh, well, she read it fast enough. She’s your own daughter for outlandish books. Mercy on us, here comes the man! We’ll just say ‘How d’ye do?’ to him, and then start for Abby’s, John. I’m not easy in my mind about the baby, and I haven’t been over since the morning. Harry says it’s nothing but stomach, but I think I know whooping-cough when I hear it. And if it is whooping-cough the boy will have to come here and rampage, I suppose, till they’re clear of it. There’s some use in grandmothers, if I do say it myself!”
If anyone had told Mr Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first notable interest of his life in the calling and the country to which even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far enough back in accounting for this one would arrive at the female sort, sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend—the mature respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire village whence he came. With such as these relations, actual or imagined, could only be of the most practical kind, matters to be arranged on grounds of expediency, and certainly not of the first importance. The things of first importance—what you could do with your energy and your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it of value to yourself—left little room for the feminine consideration in Finlay’s eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any significance. Woman in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an initiation to perceive her—a process to which Finlay would have been as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute of ideals about women—they would have formed in that case a strange exception to his general outlook—but he saw them on a plane detached and impersonal, concerned with the preservation of society the maintenance of the home, the noble devotions of motherhood. Women had been known, historically, to be capable of lofty sentiments and fine actions: he would have been the last to withhold their due from women. But they were removed from the scope of his imagination, partly by the accidents I have mentioned and partly, no doubt, by a simple lack in him of the inclination to seek and to know them.
So that Christie Cameron, when she came to stay with his aunt in Bross during the few weeks after his ordination and before his departure for Canada, found a fair light for judgement and more than a reasonable disposition to acquiesce in the scale of her merits, as a woman, on the part of Hugh Finlay. He was familiar with the scale of her merits before she came; his Aunt Lizzie did little but run them up and down. When she arrived she answered to every item she was a good height, but not too tall; a nice figure of a woman, but not what you would call stout; a fresh-faced body whose excellent principles were written in every feature she had. She was five years older than Hugh, but even that he came to accept in Aunt Lizzie’s skilful exhibition as something to the total of her advantages. A pleasant independent creature with a hundred a year of her own, sensible and vigorous and good-tempered, belonging as well to the pre-eminently right denomination. She had virtues that might have figured handsomely in an advertisement had Aunt Lizzie, in the plenitude of her good will, thought fit to take that measure on Christie’s behalf. But nothing was farther from Aunt Lizzie’s mind. We must, in fairness, add Christie Cameron to the sum of Finlay’s acquaintance with the sex; but even then the total is slender, little to go upon.
Yet the fact which Mr Finlay would in those days have considered so unimaginable remained; it had come into being and it remained. The chief interest of his life, the chief human interest, did lie in his relations with Advena Murchison. He might challenge it, but he could not move it; he might explain, but he could not alter it. And there had come no point at which it would have occurred to him to do either. When at last he had seen how simple and possible it was to enjoy Miss Murchison’s companionship upon unoccupied evenings he had begun to do it with eagerness and zest, the greater because Elgin offered him practically no other. Dr Drummond lived, for purposes of intellectual contact, at the other end of the century, the other clergy and professional men of the town were separated from Finlay by all the mental predispositions that rose from the virgin soil. He was, as Mrs Murchison said, a great gawk of a fellow; he had little adaptability; he was not of those who spend a year or two in the New World and go back with a trans-Atlantic accent, either of tongue or of mind. Where he saw a lack of dignity, of consideration, or of restraint, he did not insensibly become less dignified or considerate or restrained to smooth out perceptible differences; nor was he constituted to absorb the qualities of those defects, and enrich his nature by the geniality, the shrewdness, the quick mental movement that stood on the other side of the account. He cherished in secret an admiration for the young men of Elgin, with their unappeasable energy and their indomitable optimism, but he could not translate it in any language of sympathy and but for Advena his soul would have gone uncomforted and alone.
Advena, as we know, was his companion. Seeing herself just that, constantly content to be just that, she walked beside him closer than he knew. She had her woman’s prescience and trusted it. Her own heart, all sweetly alive, counselled her to patience; her instincts laid her in bonds to concealment. She knew, she was sure; so sure that she could play sometimes, smiling, with her living heart—
The nightingale was not yet heardFor the rose was not yet blown,
she could say of his; and what was that but play, and tender laughter, at the expense of her own? And then, perhaps, looking up from the same book, she would whisper, alone in her room—
Oh, speed the day, thou dear, dear May,
and gaze humbly through tears at her own face in the glass loving it on his behalf. She took her passion with the weight of a thing ordained; she had come upon it where it waited for her, and they had gone on together, carrying the secret. There might be farther to go, but the way could never be long.
Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary; and Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was accomplished quickly, even summer.
“Except perhaps civilization.” she added. They were both young enough to be pleased with cleverness for its specious self.
“Oh, that is slow everywhere,” he observed; “but how you can say so, with every modern improvement staring you in the face—”
“Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t the products,” and she laughed. “But the thing itself, the precious thing; that never comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art of choice—”
“If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?” he demanded. “Anaemia.”
“Oh, I don’t quarrel with the logic of it. I only point out the fact. To do that is to acquiesce, really. I acquiesce; I have to. But one may long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life has gone on longer.”
“I imagine,” Finlay said, “that to wish truly and ardently for such things is to possess them. If you didn’t possess them you wouldn’t desire them! As they say, as they say—”
“As they say?”
“About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is to be fatally infected.”
“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.
“Some novelist. I—I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon the verandah. “I don’t write novels,” he said.
“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena. “I mean, of course,” she added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”
“Heaven forbid!”
“Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it comes into your scope. You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it; you can’t feel it without living it. I don’t write novels either, but I experience—whole publishers’ lists.”
“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date. You see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern moral sophistications—?”
“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied. “I often do.”
“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stories of pain”—he looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her adoration—“and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the human heart. At least one likes to hope so.”
“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”
Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost irritably. “I only meant that I see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle. There’s reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think that you don’t half realize, in a country like this, how much there is to make up.”
“Is there anything really to make up?” she asked.
“Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as education! Here you can’t even conceive it—the schools have been on logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion; here it doesn’t even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. ‘By all mean let the ministers serve education on the School Boards,’ they would say, ‘by election like other people’—an opportunity, by the way, which has just been offered to me. I’m nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett, the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too; there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls’ playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring.”
“You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes there is something in a fresh start: we’re on the straight road as a nation, in most respects; we haven’t any picturesque old prescribed lanes to travel. So you think that makes up?”
“It’s one thing. You might put down space—elbow-room.”
“An empty horizon,” Advena murmured.
“For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England has filled hers up. She has now—these,” and he nodded at a window open to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.
“Oh, if you have a creative imagination,” she said “like Wallingham’s. But even then your vision must be only political economic, material. You can’t conceive the—flowers—that will come out of all that. And if you could it wouldn’t be like having them.”
“And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid, buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the plenty of things!”
“I am to be consoled because apples are cheap.”
“You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn’t it console you to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?”
“No,” said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said—
“And those things aren’t all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the human spirit, as it is set free in these wide unblemished spaces, may be something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is good and beautiful—”
He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful blush.
“I am glad you are so well satisfied,” she said, and then, as if her words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.
Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.