Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out beside it, twice every Sunday for twenty years. He was a small spare man, with thin grey hair that fell back from the narrow dome of his forehead to his coat collar, decent and severe. He ascended the pulpit exactly three minutes before the minister did; and the dignity with which he put one foot before the other made his appearance a ceremonious feature of the service and a thing quoted. “I was there before Peter” was a triumphant evidence of punctuality. Dr Drummond would have liked to make it a test. It seemed to him no great thing to expect the people of Knox Church to be there before Peter.
Macfarlane was also in attendance in the vestry to help the minister off with his gown and hang it up. Dr Drummond’s gown needed neither helping nor hanging; the Doctor was deftness and neatness and impatience itself, and would have it on the hook with his own hands, and never a fold crooked. After Mr Finlay, on the contrary, Peter would have to pick up and smooth out—ten to one the garment would be flung on a chair. Still, he was invariably standing by to see it flung, and to hand Mr Finlay his hat and stick. He was surprised and put about to find himself one Sunday evening too late for this attendance. The vestry was empty, the gown was on the floor. Peter gathered it up with as perturbed an air as if Mr Finlay had omitted a point of church observance. “I doubt they get into slack ways in these missions,” said Peter. He had been unable, with Dr Drummond, to see the necessity for such extensions.
Meanwhile Hugh Finlay, in secular attire, had left the church by the vestry door, and was rapidly overtaking groups of his hearers as they walked homeward. He was unusually aware of his change of dress because of a letter in the inside pocket of his coat. The letter, in that intimate place, spread a region of consciousness round it which hastened his blood and his step. There was purpose in his whole bearing; Advena Murchison, looking back at some suggestion of Lorne’s, caught it, and lost for a moment the meaning of what she said. When he overtook them, with plain intention, she walked beside the two men, withdrawn and silent, like a child. It was unexpected and overwhelming, his joining them after the service, accompanying them, as it were, in the flesh after having led them so far in the spirit; he had never done it before. She felt her heart confronted with a new, an immediate issue, and suddenly afraid. It shrank from the charge for which it longed, and would have fled; yet, paralysed with delight, it kept time with her sauntering feet.
They talked of the sermon, which had been strongly tinged with the issue of the day. Dreamer as he was by temperament, Finlay held to the wisdom of informing great public questions with the religious idea, vigorously disclaimed that it was anywhere inadmissible.
“You’ll have to settle with the Doctor, Mr Finlay,” Lorne warned him gaily, “if you talk politics in Knox Church. He thinks he never does.”
“Do you think,” said Finlay, “that he would object to—to one’s going as far afield as I did tonight?”
“He oughtn’t to,” said Lorne. “You should have heard him when old Sir John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation couldn’t say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits.”
Finlay smiled gravely. “Political convictions are a man’s birthright,” he said. “Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them. But of course there are limits beyond which pulpit influence should not go, and I am sure Dr Drummond has the clearest perception of them. He seems to have been a wonderful fellow, Macdonald, a man with extraordinary power of imaginative enterprise. I wonder whether he would have seen his way to linking up the Empire as he linked up your Provinces here?”
“He’d have hated uncommonly to be in opposition, but I don’t see how he could have helped it,” Lorne said. “He was the godfather of Canadian manufacturers, you know—the Tories have always been the industrial party. He couldn’t have gone for letting English stuff in free, or cheap; and yet he was genuinely loyal and attached to England. He would discriminate against Manchester with tears in his eyes! Imperialist in his time spelled Conservative, now it spells Liberal. The Conservatives have always talked the loudest about the British bond, but when it lately came to doing we’re on record on the right side, and they’re on record on the wrong. But it must make the old man’s ghost sick to see—”
“To see his court suit stolen,” Advena finished for him. “As Disraeli said—wasn’t it Disraeli?” She heard, and hated the note of constraint in her voice. “Am I reduced,” she thought, indignantly, “to falsetto?” and chose, since she must choose, the betrayal of silence.
“It did one good to hear the question discussed on the higher level,” said Lorne. “You would think, to read the papers, that all its merits could be put into dollars and cents.”
“I’ve noticed some of them in terms of sentiment—affection for the mother country—”
“Yes, that’s lugged in. But it doesn’t cover the moral aspect,” Lorne returned. “It’s too easy and obvious, as well; it gives the enemy cause to offend.”
“Well, there’s a tremendous moral aspect,” Finlay said, “tremendous moral potentialities hidden in the issue. England has more to lose than she dreams.”
“That’s just where I felt, as a practical politician, a little restless while you were preaching,” said Lorne, laughing. “You seemed to think the advantage of imperialism was all with England. You mustn’t press that view on us, you know. We shall get harder to bargain with. Besides, from the point of your sermon, it’s all the other way.”
“Oh, I don’t agree! The younger nations can work out their own salvation unaided; but can England alone? Isn’t she too heavily weighted?”
“Oh, materially, very likely! But morally, no,” said Lorne, stoutly. “There, if you like, she has accumulations that won’t depreciate. Money isn’t the only capital the colonies offer investment for.”
“I’m afraid I see it in the shadow of the degeneration of age and poverty,” said Finlay, smiling—“or age and wealth, if you prefer it.”
“And we in the disadvantage of youth and easy success,” Lorne retorted. “We’re all very well, but we’re not the men our fathers were: we need a lot of licking into shape. Look at that disgraceful business of ours in the Ontario legislature the other day, and look at that fellow of yours walking out of office at Westminster last session because of a disastrous business connection which he was morally as clear of as you or I! I tell you we’ve got to hang on to the things that make us ashamed; and I guess we’ve got sense enough to know it. But this is my corner. I am going to look in at the Milburns’, Advena. Good night, Mr Finlay.”
Advena, walking on with Finlay, became suddenly aware that he had not once addressed her. She had the quick impression that Lorne left him bereft of a refuge; his plight heartened her.
“If the politicians on both sides were only as mutually appreciative,” she said, “the Empire would soon be knit.”
For a moment he did not answer. “I am afraid the economic situation is not quite analogous,” he said, stiffly and absently, when the moment had passed.
“Why does your brother always call me ‘Mr’ Finlay?” he demanded presently. “It isn’t friendly.”
The note of irritation in his voice puzzled her. “I think the form is commoner with us,” she said, “even among men who know each other fairly well.” Her secret glance flashed over the gulf that nevertheless divided Finlay and her brother, that would always divide them. She saw it with something like pain, which struggled through her pride in both. “And then, you know—your calling—”
“I suppose it is that,” he replied, ill content.
“I’ve noticed Dr Drummond’s way,” she told him, with rising spirits. “It’s delightful. He drops the ‘Mr’ with fellow-ministers of his own denomination only—never with Wesleyans or Baptists, for a moment. He always comes back very genial from the General Assembly, and full of stories. ‘I said to Grant,’ or ‘Macdonald said to me’—and he always calls you ‘Finlay,’” she added shyly. “By the way, I suppose you know he’s to be the new Moderator?”
“Is he, indeed? Yes—yes, of course, I knew! We couldn’t have a better.”
They walked on through the early autumn night. It was just not raining. The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which lay thick under their feet. Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along. She had picked up half a dozen when he spoke again. “I want to tell you—I have to tell you—something—about myself, Miss Murchison.”
“I should like,” said Advena steadily, “to hear.”
“It is a matter that has, I am ashamed to confess, curiously gone out of my mind of late—I should say until lately. There was little until lately—I am so poor a letter writer—to remind me of it. I am engaged to be married!”
“But how interesting!” exclaimed Advena.
He looked at her taken aback. His own mood was heavy; it failed to answer this lightness from her. It is hard to know what he expected, what his unconscious blood expected for him; but it was not this. If he had little wisdom about the hearts of women, he had less about their behaviour. She said nothing more, but inclined her head in an angle of deference and expectation toward what he should further communicate.
“I don’t know that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland,” he went on. “It has always seemed to me so remote and—disconnected with everything here. I could not suppose it would interest anyone. I was cared for and educated by my father’s only sister, a good woman. It was as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed in work. I don’t know that I can make you understand. She was identified with all the rest—I left it to her. Shortly before I sailed for Canada she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and—welfare, and with—a niece of her husband’s who was staying with us at the time, a person suitable in every way. Apart from my aunt, I do not know—However, I owed everything to her, and I—took her advice in the matter. I left it to her. She is a managing woman; but she can nearly always prove herself right. Her mind ran a great deal, a little too much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in emigrating a man might do well to companion himself.”
“That was prudent of her,” said Advena.
He turned a look upon her. “You are not—making a mock of it?” he said.
“I am not making a mock of it.”
“My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie’s home has been broken up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to write.”
He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed the turning to the Murchisons’, walking on with the single consciousness of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not know.
“You are to write,” she said. She sought in vain for more words; he also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.
“It seems so extraordinarily—far away,” said Hugh Finlay, of Bross, Dumfries, at length.
“But it will come near,” Advena replied.
“I don’t think it ever can.”
She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.
“They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and the man whom I remember to have been me—there is a gulf fixed—”
“It is only the Atlantic,” Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.
He shook his head. “It is not marked in any geography,” he said, and gave her a troubled smile. “How can I make it clear to you? I have come here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before. I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty and charm of mere vitality—you have always been so alive. One finds a physical freedom in which one’s very soul seems to expand; one hears the happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to respond—”
The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm, healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his, could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.
It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short of man’s dignity, of man’s estate, for his own sake.
“It is a curious history,” she said. “You are right in thinking I should not find it quite easy to understand. We make those—arrangements—so much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important than they are.”
“But they are of the highest importance.” He stopped short, confounded.
“I shall try to consecrate my marriage,” he said presently, more to himself than to Advena.
Her thought told him bitterly: “I am afraid it is the only thing you can do with it,” but something else came to her lips.
“I have not congratulated you. I am not sure,” she went on, with astonishing candour, “whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all my heart. Are you happy now?”
He turned his great dark eyes on her. “I am as happy, I dare say, as I have any need to be.”
“But you are happier since your letter came?”
“No,” he said. The simple word fell on her heart, and she forbore.
They went on again in silence until they arrived at a place from which they saw the gleam of the river and the line of the hills beyond. Advena stopped.
“We came here once before together—in the spring. Do you remember?” she asked.
“I remember very well.” She had turned, and he with her. They stood together with darkness about them, through which they could just see each other’s faces.
“It was spring then, and I went back alone. You are still living up that street? Good night, then, please. I wish again—to go back—alone.”
He looked at her for an instant in dumb bewilderment, though her words were simple enough. Then as she made a step away from him he caught her hand.
“Advena,” he faltered, “what has happened to us? This time I cannot let you.”
“Lorne,” said Dora Milburn, in her most animated manner, “who do you think is coming to Elgin? Your London friend, Mr Hesketh! He’s going to stay with the Emmetts, and Mrs Emmett is perfectly distracted; she says he’s accustomed to so much, she doesn’t know how he will put up with their plain way of living. Though what she means by that, with late dinner and afternoon tea every day of her life, is more than I know.”
“Why, that’s splendid!” replied Lorne. “Good old Hesketh! I knew he thought of coming across this fall, but the brute hasn’t written to me. We’ll have to get him over to our place. When he gets tired of the Emmetts’ plain ways he can try ours—they’re plainer. You’ll like Hesketh; he’s a good fellow, and more go-ahead than most of them.”
“I don’t think I should ask him to stay if I were you, Lorne. Your mother will never consent to change her hours for meals. I wouldn’t dream of asking an Englishman to stay if I couldn’t give him late dinner; they think so much of it. It’s the trial of Mother’s life that Father will not submit to it. As a girl she was used to nothing else. Afternoon tea we do have, he can’t prevent that, but Father kicks at anything but one o’clock dinner and meat tea at six, and I suppose he always will.”
“Doesn’t one tea spoil the other?” Lorne inquired. “I find it does when I go to your minister’s and peck at a cress sandwich at five. You haven’t any appetite for a reasonable meal at six. But I guess it won’t matter to Hesketh; he’s got a lot of sense about things of that sort. Why he served out in South Africa—volunteered. Mrs Emmett needn’t worry. And if we find him pining for afternoon tea we can send him over here.”
“Well, if he’s nice. But I suppose he’s pretty sure to be nice. Any friend of the Emmetts—What is he like, Lorne?”
“Oh, he’s just a young man with a moustache! You seem to see a good many over there. They’re all alike while they’re at school in round coats, and after they leave school they get moustaches, and then they’re all alike again.”
“I wish you wouldn’t tease. How tall is he? Is he fair or dark? What colour are his eyes?”
Lorne buried his head in his hands in a pretended agony of recollection.
“So far as I remember, not exactly tall, but you wouldn’t call him short. Complexion—well, don’t you know?—that kind of middling complexion. Colour of his eyes—does anybody ever notice a thing like that? You needn’t take my word for it, but I should say they were a kind of average coloured eyes.”
“Lorne! You ARE—I suppose I’ll just have to wait till I see him. But the girls are wild to know, and I said I’d ask you. He’ll be here in about two weeks anyhow, and I dare say we won’t find him so much to make a fuss about. The best sort of Englishmen don’t come over such a very great deal, as you say. I expect they have a better time at home.”
“Hesketh’s a very good sort of Englishman,” said Lorne.
“He’s awfully well off, isn’t he?”
“According to our ideas I suppose he is,” said Lorne. “Not according to English ideas.”
“Still less according to New York ones, then,” asserted Dora. “They wouldn’t think much of it there even if he passed for rich in England.” It was a little as if she resented Lorne’s comparison of standards, and claimed the American one as at least cis-Atlantic.
“He has a settled income,” said Lorne, “and he’s never had to work for it, whatever luck there is in that. That’s all I know. Dora—”
“Now, Lorne, you’re not to be troublesome.”
“Your mother hasn’t come in at all this evening. Don’t you think it’s a good sign?”
“She isn’t quite so silly as she was,” remarked Dora. “Why I should not have the same freedom as other girls in entertaining my gentleman friends I never could quite see.”
“I believe if we told her we had made up our minds it would be all right,” he pleaded.
“I’m not so sure Lorne. Mother’s so deep. You can’t always tell just by what she DOES. She thinks Stephen Stuart likes me—it’s too perfectly idiotic; we are the merest friends—and when it’s any question of you and Stephen—well, she doesn’t say anything, but she lets me see! She thinks such a lot of the Stuarts because Stephen’s father was Ontario Premier once, and got knighted.”
“I might try for that myself if you think it would please her,” said the lover.
“Please her! And I should be Lady Murchison!” she let fall upon his ravished ears. “Why, Lorne, she’d just worship us both! But you’ll never do it.”
“Why not?”
Dora looked at him with pretty speculation. She had reasons for supposing that she did admire the young man.
“You’re too nice,” she said.
“That isn’t good enough,” he responded, and drew her nearer.
“Then why did you ask me?—No, Lorne, you are not to. Suppose Father came in?”
“I shouldn’t mind—Father’s on my side, I think.”
“Father isn’t on anybody’s side,” said his daughter, wisely.
“Dora, let me speak to him!”
Miss Milburn gave a clever imitation of a little scream of horror.
“INDEED I won’t! Lorne, you are never, NEVER to do that! As if we were in a ridiculous English novel!”
“That’s the part of an English novel I always like,” said Lorne. “The going and asking. It must about scare the hero out of a year’s growth; but it’s a glorious thing to do—it would be next day, anyhow.”
“It’s just the sort of thing to please Mother,” Dora meditated, “but she can’t be indulged all the time. No, Lorne, you’ll have to leave it to me—when there’s anything to tell.”
“There’s everything to tell now,” said he, who had indeed nothing to keep back.
“But you know what Mother is, Lorne. Suppose they hadn’t any objection, she would never keep it to herself! She’d want to go announcing it all over the place; she’d think it was the proper thing to do.”
“But, Dora, why not? If you knew how I want to announce it! I should like to publish it in the sunrise—and the wind—so that I couldn’t go out of doors without seeing it myself.”
“I shouldn’t mind having it in Toronto Society, when the time comes. But not yet, Lorne—not for ages. I’m only twenty-two—nobody thinks of settling down nowadays before she’s twenty-five at the very earliest. I don’t know a single girl in this town that has—among my friends, anyway. That’s three years off, and you CAN’T expect me to be engaged for three years.”
“No.” said Lorne, “engaged six months, married the rest of the time. Or the periods might run concurrently if you preferred—I shouldn’t mind.”
“An engaged girl has the very worst time. She gets hardly any attention, and as to dances—well, it’s a good thing for her if the person she’s engaged to CAN dance,” she added, teasingly.
Lorne coloured. “You said I was improving, Dora,” he said, and then laughed at the childish claim. “But that isn’t really a thing that counts, is it? If our lives only keep step it won’t matter much about the ‘Washington Post.’ And so far as attention goes, you’ll get it as long as you live, you little princess. Besides, isn’t it better to wear the love of one man than the admiration of half a dozen?”
“And be teased and worried half out of your life by everybody you meet? Now, Lorne, you’re getting serious and sentimental, and you know I hate that. It isn’t any good either—Mother always used to say it made me more stubborn to appeal to me. Horrid nature to have, isn’t it?”
Lorne’s hand went to his waistcoat pocket and came back with a tiny packet. “It’s come, Dora—by this morning’s English mail.”
Her eyes sparkled, and then rested with guarded excitement upon the little case. “Oh, Lorne!”
She said nothing more, but watched intently while he found the spring, and disclosed the ring within. Then she drew a long breath. “Lorne Murchison, what a lovely one!”
“Doesn’t it look,” said he, “just a little serious and sentimental?”
“But SUCH good style, too,” he declared, bending over it. “And quite new—I haven’t seen anything a bit like it. I do love a design when it’s graceful. Solitaires are so old-fashioned.”
He kept his eyes upon her face, feeding upon the delight in it. Exultation rose up in him: he knew the primitive guile of man, indifferent to such things, alluring with them the other creature. He did not stop to condone her weakness; rather he seized it in ecstasy; it was all part of the glad scheme to help the lover. He turned the diamonds so that they flashed and flashed again before her. Then, trusting his happy instinct, he sought for her hand. But she held that back. “I want to SEE it,” she declared, and he was obliged to let her take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat elated and adoring, the simple fellow.
Reluctantly at last she gave up her hand. “But it’s only trying on—not putting on,” she told him. He said nothing till it flashed upon her finger, and in her eyes he saw a spark from below of that instinctive cupidity toward jewels that man can never recognize as it deserves in woman, because of his desire to gratify it.
“You’ll wear it, Dora?” he pleaded.
“Lorne, you are the dearest fellow! But how could I? Everybody would guess!”
Her gaze, nevertheless, rested fascinated on the ring, which she posed as it pleased her.
“Let them guess! I’d rather they knew, but—it does look well on your finger, dear.”
She held it up once more to the light, then slipped it decisively off and gave it back to him. “I can’t, you know, Lorne. I didn’t really say you might get it; and now you’ll have to keep it till—till the time comes. But this much I will say—it’s the sweetest thing, and you’ve shown the loveliest taste, and if it weren’t such a dreadful give-away I’d like to wear it awfully.”
They discussed it with argument, with endearment, with humour, and reproach, but her inflexible basis soon showed through their talk: she would not wear the ring. So far he prevailed, that it was she, not he, who kept it. Her insistence that he should take it back brought something like anger out of him; and in the surprise of this she yielded so much. She did it unwillingly at the time, but afterward, when she tried on the thing again in the privacy of her own room; she was rather satisfied to have it, safe under lock and key, a flashing, smiling mystery to visit when she liked and reveal when she would.
“Lorne could never get me such a beauty again if he lost it,” she advised herself, “and he’s awfully careless. And I’m not sure that I won’t tell Eva Delarue, just to show it to her. She’s as close as wax.”
One feels a certain sorrow for the lover on his homeward way, squaring his shoulders against the foolish perversity of the feminine mind, resolutely guarding his heart from any hint of real reprobation. Through the sweetness of her lips and the affection of her pretty eyes, through all his half-possession of all her charms and graces, must have come dully the sense of his great occasion manque, that dear day of love when it leaves the mark of its claim. And in one’s regret there is perhaps some alloy of pity, that less respectful thing. We know him elsewhere capable of essaying heights, yet we seem to look down upon the drama of his heart. It may be well to remember that the level is not everything in love. He who carefully adjusts an intellectual machine may descry a higher mark; he can construct nothing in a mistress; he is, therefore, able to see the facts and to discriminate the desirable. But Lorne loved with all his imagination. This way dares the imitation of the gods by which it improves the quality of the passion, so that such a love stands by itself to be considered, apart from the object, one may say. A strong and beautiful wave lifted Lorne Murchison along to his destiny, since it was the pulse of his own life, though Dora Milburn played moon to it.
Alfred Hesketh had, after all, written to young Murchison about his immediate intention of sailing for Canada and visiting Elgin; the letter arrived a day or two later. It was brief and businesslike, but it gave Lorne to understand that since his departure the imperial idea had been steadily fermenting, not only in the national mind, but particularly in Hesketh’s; that it produced in his case a condition only to be properly treated by personal experience. Hesketh was coming over to prove whatever advantage there was in seeing for yourself. That he was coming with the right bias Lorne might infer, he said, from the fact that he had waited a fortnight to get his passage by the only big line to New York that stood out for our mercantile supremacy against American combination.
“He needn’t bother to bring any bias,” Lorne remarked when he had read this, “but he’ll have to pay a lot of extra luggage on the one he takes back with him.”
He felt a little irritation at being offered the testimony of the Cunard ticket. Back on his native soil, its independence ran again like sap in him: nobody wanted a present of good will; the matter stood on its merits.
He was glad, nevertheless, that Hesketh was coming, gratified that it would now be his turn to show prospects, and turn figures into facts, and make plain the imperial profit from the further side. Hesketh was such an intelligent fellow, there would be the keenest sort of pleasure in demonstrating things, big things, to him, little things, too, ways of living, differences of habit. Already in the happy exercise of his hospitable instinct he saw how Hesketh would get on with his mother, with Stella, with Dr Drummond. He saw Hesketh interested, domiciled, remaining—the ranch life this side of the Rockies, Lorne thought, would tempt him, or something new and sound in Winnipeg. He kept his eye open for chances, and noted one or two likely things. “We want labour mostly,” he said to Advena, “but nobody is refused leave to land because he has a little money.”
“I should think not, indeed,” remarked Mrs Murchison, who was present. “I often wish your father and I had had a little more when we began. That whole Gregory block was going for three thousand dollars then. I wonder what it’s worth now?”
“Yes, but you and Father are worth more, too,” remarked Stella acutely.
“In fact, all the elder members of the family have approximated in value, Stella,” said her brother, “and you may too, in time.”
“I’ll take my chance with the country,” she retorted. They were all permeated with the question of the day; even Stella, after holding haughtily aloof for some time, had been obliged to get into step, as she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England, here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops and the offices, up and down the tree-bordered streets as men went to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about. Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong friendships, male and female in every form of “the Collegiate,” had been put to this touchstone, sometimes with shattering effect. If you would not serve with Wallingham the greatness of Britain you were held to favour going over to the United States; there was no middle course. It became a personal matter in the ward schools and small boys pursued small boys with hateful cries of “Annexationist!” The subject even trickled about the apple-barrels and potato-bags of the market square. Here it should have raged, pregnant as it was with bucolic blessing; but our agricultural friends expect nothing readily except adverse weather, least of all a measure of economic benefit to themselves. Those of Fox County thought it looked very well, but it was pretty sure to work out some other way. Elmore Crow failed heavily to catch a light even from Lorne Murchison.
“You keep your hair on, Lorne,” he advised. “We ain’t going to get such big changes yet. An’ if we do the blooming syndicates ‘ll spoil ‘em for us.”
There were even dissentients among the farmers. The voice of one was raised who had lived laborious years, and many of them in the hope of seeing his butter and cheese go unimpeded across the American line. It must be said, however, that still less attention was paid to him, and it was generally conceded that he would die without the sight.
It was the great topic. The day Wallingham went his defiant furthest in the House and every colonial newspaper set it up in acclaiming headlines, Horace Williams, enterprising fellow, remembered that Lorne had seen the great man under circumstances that would probably pan out, and send round Rawlins. Rawlins was to get something that would do to call “Wallingham in the Bosom of his Family,” and as much as Lorne cared to pour into him about his own view of the probable issue. Rawlins failed to get the interview, came back to say that Lorne didn’t seem to think himself a big enough boy for that, but he did not return empty-handed. Mr Murchison sent Mr Williams the promise of some contributions upon the question of the hour, which he had no objection to sign and which Horace should have for the good of the cause. Horace duly had them, the Express duly published them, and they were copied in full by the Dominion and several other leading journals, with an amount of comment which everyone but Mrs Murchison thought remarkable.
“I don’t pretend to understand it,” she said, “but anybody can see that he knows what he’s talking about.” John Murchison read them with a critical eye and a pursed-out lip.
“He takes too much for granted.”
“What does he take for granted?” asked Mrs Murchison.
“Other folks being like himself,” said the father.
That, no doubt, was succinct and true; nevertheless, the articles had competence as well as confidence. The writer treated facts with restraint and conditions with sympathy. He summoned ideas from the obscurity of men’s minds, and marshalled them in the light, so that many recognized what they had been trying to think. He wrote with homeliness as well as force, wishing much more to make the issue recognizable than to create fine phrases, with the result that one or two of his sentences passed into the language of the discussion which, as any of its standard-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric. The articles were competent: if you listened to Horace Williams you would have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr Williams. It was their enthusiasm, however, that gave them the wing on which they travelled. People naturally took different views, even of this quality. “Young Murchison’s working the imperial idea for all it’s worth,” was Walter Winter’s; and Octavius Milburn humorously summed up the series as “tall talk.”
Alfred Hesketh came, it was felt, rather opportunely into the midst of this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival; but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts’ pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger. The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain. Hesketh was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal. They did not perhaps say it, but it was in their minds. “There’s one of them,” was what they thought when they met him in the street. At any other time he would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very romance of destiny. The perception was obscure, but it was there. Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed, well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps, who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or theirs to him.
He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the following day. They greeted heartily. “Now this IS good!” said Lorne, and he thought so. Hesketh confided his first impression. “It’s not unlike an English country town,” he said, “only the streets are wider, and the people don’t look so much in earnest.”
“Oh, they’re just as much in earnest some of the time,” Lorne laughed, “but maybe not all the time!”
The sun shone crisply round them; there was a brisk October market; on the other side of the road Elmore Crow dangled his long legs over a cart flap and chewed a cheroot. Elgin was abroad, doing business on its wide margin of opportunity. Lorne cast a backward glance at conditions he had seen.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Sharp of you to spot it so soon, old chap! You’re staying with the English Church minister, aren’t you—Mr Emmett? Some connection of yours, aren’t they?”
“Mrs Emmett is Chafe’s sister—Mrs Chafe, you know, is my aunt,” Hesketh reminded him. “I say, Murchison, I left old Chafe wilder than ever. Wallingham’s committee keep sending him leaflets and things. They take it for granted he’s on the right side, since his interests are. The other day they asked him for a subscription! The old boy sent his reply to the Daily News and carried it about for a week. I think that gave him real satisfaction; but he hates the things by post.”
Lorne laughed delightedly. “I expect he’s snowed under with them. I sent him my own valuable views last week.”
“I’m afraid they’ll only stiffen him. That got to be his great argument after you left, the fact that you fellows over here want it. He doesn’t approve of a bargain if the other side sees a profit. Curiously enough, his foremen and people out in Chiswick are all for it. I was talking to one of them just before I left—‘Stands to reason, sir,’ he said, ‘we don’t want to pay more for a loaf than we do now. But we’ll do it, sir, if it means downing them Germans; he said.”
Lorne’s eyebrows half-perceptibly twitched. “They do ‘sir’ you a lot over there, don’t they?” he said. “It was as much as I could do to get at what a fellow of that sort meant, tumbling over the ‘sirs’ he propped it up with. Well, all kinds of people, all kinds of argument, I suppose, when it comes to trying to get ‘em solid! But I was going to say we are all hoping you’ll give us a part of your time while you’re in Elgin. My family are looking forward to meeting you. Come along and let me introduce you to my father now—he’s only round the corner.”
“By all means!” said Hesketh, and they fell into step together. As Lorne said, it was only a short distance, but far enough to communicate a briskness, an alertness, from the step of one young man to that of the other. “I wish it were five miles,” Hesketh said, all his stall-fed muscles responding to the new call of his heart and lungs. “Any good walks about here? I asked Emmett, but he didn’t know—supposed you could walk to Clayfield if you didn’t take the car. He seems to have lost his legs. I suppose parsons do.”
“Not all of them,” said Lorne. “There’s a fellow that has a church over in East Elgin, Finlay his name is, that beats the record of anything around here. He just about ranges the county in the course of a week.”
“The place is too big for one parish, no doubt,” Hesketh remarked.
“Oh, he’s a Presbyterian! The Episcopalians haven’t got any hold to speak of over there. Here we are,” said Lorne, and turned in at the door. The old wooden sign was long gone. “John Murchison and Sons” glittered instead in the plate-glass windows, but Hesketh did not see it.
“Why do you think he’ll be in here?” he asked, on young Murchison’s heels.
“Because he always is when he isn’t over at the shop,” replied Lorne. “It’s his place of business—his store, you know. There he is! Hard luck—he’s got a customer. We’ll have to wait.”
He went on ahead with his impetuous step; he did not perceive the instant’s paralysis that seemed to overtake Hesketh’s, whose foot dragged, however, no longer than that. It was an initiation; he had been told he might expect some. He checked his impulse to be amused, and guarded his look round, not to show unseemly curiosity. His face, when he was introduced to Alec, who was sorting some odd dozens of tablespoons, was neutral and pleasant. He reflected afterward that he had been quite equal to the occasion. He thought, too, that he had shown some adaptability. Alec was not a person of fluent discourse, and when he had inquired whether Hesketh was going to make a long stay, the conversation might have languished but for this.
“Is that Birmingham?” he asked, nodding kindly at the spoons.
“Came to us through a house in Liverpool,” Alec responded. “I expect you had a stormy crossing, Mr Hesketh.”
“It was a bit choppy. We had the fiddles on most of the time,” Hesketh replied. “Most of the time. Now, how do you find the bicycle trade over here? Languishing, as it is with us?”
“Oh, it keeps up pretty well,” said Alec, “but we sell more spoons. ‘N’ what do you think of this country, far as you’ve seen it?”
“Oh, come now, it’s a little soon to ask, isn’t it? Yes—I suppose bicycles go out of fashion, and spoons never do. I was thinking,” added Hesketh, casting his eyes over a serried rank, “of buying a bicycle.”
Alec had turned to put the spoons in their place on the shelves. “Better take your friend across to Cox’s,” he advised Lorne over his shoulder. “He’ll be able to get a motorbike there,” a suggestion which gave Mr Hesketh to reflect later that if that was the general idea of doing business it must be an easy country to make money in.
The customer was satisfied at last, and Mr Murchison walked sociably to the door with him; it was the secretary of the local Oddfellows’ Lodge, who had come in about a furnace.
“Now’s our chance,” said Lorne. “Father, this is Mr Hesketh, from London—my father, Hesketh. He can tell you all you want to know about Canada—this part of it, anyway. Over thirty years, isn’t it, Father, since you came out?”
“Glad to meet you,” said John Murchison, “glad to meet you, Mr Hesketh. We’ve heard much about you.”
“You must have been quite among the pioneers of Elgin, Mr Murchison,” said Hesketh as they shook hands. Alec hadn’t seemed to think of that; Hesketh put it down to the counter.
“Not quite,” said John. “We’ll say among the early arrivals.”
“Have you ever been back in your native Scotland?” asked Hesketh.
“Aye, twice.”
“But you prefer the land of your adoption?”
“I do. But I think by now it’ll be kin,” said Mr Murchison. “It was good to see the heather again, but a man lives best where he’s taken root.”
“Yes, yes. You seem to do a large business here, Mr Murchison.”
“Pretty well for the size of the place. You must get Lorne to take you over Elgin. It’s a fair sample of our rising manufacturing towns.”
“I hope he will. I understand you manufacture to some extent yourself?”
“We make our own stoves and a few odd things.”
“You don’t send any across the Atlantic yet?” queried Hesketh jocularly.
“Not yet. No, sir!”
Then did Mr Hesketh show himself in true sympathy with the novel and independent conditions of the commonwealth he found himself in.
“I beg you won’t use that form with me,” he said, “I know it isn’t the custom of the country, and I am a friend of your son’s, you see.”
The iron merchant looked at him, just an instant’s regard, in which astonishment struggled with the usual deliberation. Then his considering hand went to his chin.
“I see. I must remember,” he said.
The son, Lorne, glanced in the pause beyond John Murchison’s broad shoulders, through the store door and out into the moderate commerce of Main Street, which had carried the significance and the success of his father’s life. His eye came back and moved over the contents of the place, taking stock of it, one might say, and adjusting the balance with pride. He had said very little since they had been in the store. Now he turned to Hesketh quietly.
“I wouldn’t bother about that if I were you,” he said. “My father spoke quite—colloquially.”
“Oh!” said Hesketh.
They parted on the pavement outside. “I hope you understand,” said Lorne, with an effort at heartiness, “how glad my parents will be to have you if you find yourself able to spare us any of your time?”
“Thanks very much,” said Hesketh; “I shall certainly give myself the pleasure of calling as soon as possible.”