Mr Farquharson was to retain his seat until the early spring, for the double purpose of maintaining his influence upon an important commission of which he was chairman until the work should be done, and of giving the imperial departure championed by his successor as good a chance as possible of becoming understood in the constituency. It was understood that the new writ would issue for a date in March; Elgin referred all interest to that point, and prophesied for itself a lively winter. Another event, of importance less general, was arranged for the end of February—the arrival of Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon from Scotland. Finlay had proposed an earlier date, but matters of business connected with her mother’s estate would delay Miss Cameron’s departure. Her arrival would be the decisive point of another campaign. He and Advena faced it without misgiving, but there were moments when Finlay greatly wished the moment past.
Their intimacy had never been conspicuous, and their determination to make no change in it could be carried out without attracting attention. It was very dear to them, that determination. They saw it as a test, as an ideal. Last of all, perhaps, as an alleviation. They were both too much encumbered with ideas to move simply, quickly, on the impulse of passion. They looked at it through the wrong end of the glass, and thought they put it farther away. They believed that their relation comprised, would always comprise, the best of life. It was matter for discussion singularly attractive; they allowed themselves upon it wide scope in theory. They could speak of it in the heroic temper, without sadness or bitterness; the thing was to tear away the veil and look fate in the face. The great thing, perhaps, was to speak of it while still they could give themselves leave; a day would arrive, they acknowledged with averted eyes, when dumbness would be more becoming. Meanwhile, Mrs Murchison would have found it hard to sustain her charge against them that they talked of nothing but books and authors; the philosophy of life, as they were intensely creating it, was more entrancing than any book or any author. Simply and definitely, and to their own satisfaction, they had abandoned the natural demands of their state; they lived in its exaltation and were far from accidents. Deep in both of them was a kind of protective nobility; I will not say it cost them nothing, but it turned the scenes between them into comedy of the better sort, the kind that deserves the relief of stone or bronze. Advena, had she heard it, would have repelled Dr Drummond’s warning with indignation. If it were so possible to keep their friendship on an unfaltering level then, with the latitude they had, what danger could attend them later, when the social law would support them, divide them, protect them? Dr Drummond, suspecting all, looked grimly on, and from November to March found no need to invite Mr Finlay to occupy the pulpit of Knox Church.
They had come to full knowledge that night of their long walk in the dark together; but even then, in the rush and shock and glory of it, they had held apart; and their broken avowals had crossed with difficulty from one to the other. The whole fabric of circumstance was between them, to realize and to explore; later surveys, as we know, had not reduced it. They gave it great credit as a barrier; I suppose because it kept them out of each other’s arms. It had done that.
It was Advena, I fear, who insisted most that they should continue upon terms of happy debt to one another, the balance always changing, the account never closed and rendered. She no doubt felt that she might impose the terms; she had unconsciously the sense of greater sacrifice, and knew that she had been mistress of the situation long before he was aware of it. He agreed with joy and with misgiving; he saw with enthusiasm her high conception of their alliance, but sometimes wondered, poor fellow, whether he was right in letting it cover him. He came to the house as he had done before, as often as he could, and reproached himself that he could not, after all, come very often.
That they should discuss their relation as candidly as they sustained it was perhaps a little peculiar to them, so I have laid stress on it; but it was not by any means their sole preoccupation. They talked like tried friends of their every-day affairs. Indeed, after the trouble and intoxication of their great understanding had spent itself, it was the small practical interests of life that seemed to hold them most. One might think that Nature, having made them her invitation upon the higher plane, abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the warm human commonplaces that do her work well enough with the common type. Mrs Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to overhear.
“I wouldn’t advise you to have it lined with fur,” Advena was saying. The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a buffalo-skin the following day. “And the buffaloes are all gone, you know—thirty years ago,” she laughed. “You really are not modern in practical matters. Does it ever surprise you that you get no pemmican for dinner, and hardly ever meet an Indian in his feathers?”
He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes. It was a new discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him, only revealed since she had come out of her bonds to love; it was hard to say which of them took the greater pleasure in it.
“What is the use of living in Canada if you can’t have fur on your clothes?” he demanded.
“You may have a little—astrakhan, I would—on the collar and cuffs,” she said. “A fur lining is too hot if there happens to be a thaw, and then you would leave it off and take cold. You have all the look,” she added, with a gravely considering glance at him, “of a person who ought to take care of his chest.”
He withdrew his eyes hurriedly, and fixed them instead on his pipe. He always brought it with him, by her order, and Advena usually sewed. He thought as he watched her that it made the silences enjoyable.
“And expensive, I dare say, too,” he said.
“Yes, more or less. Alec paid fifty dollars for his, and never liked it.”
“Fifty dollars—ten pounds! No vair for me!” he declared. “By the way, Mrs Firmin is threatening to turn me out of house and home. A married daughter is coming to live with her, and she wants my rooms.”
“When does she come—the married daughter?”
“Oh, not till the early spring! There’s no immediate despair,” said Finlay, “but it is dislocating. My books and I had just succeeded in making room for one another.”
“But you will have to move, in any case, in the early spring.”
“I suppose I will. I had—I might have remembered that.”
“Have you found a house yet?” Advena asked him.
“No.”
“Have you been looking?” It was a gentle, sensible reminder.
“I’m afraid I haven’t.” He moved in his chair as if in physical discomfort. “Do you think I ought—so soon? There are always plenty of—houses, aren’t there?”
“Not plenty of desirable ones. Do you think you must live in East Elgin?”
“It would be rather more convenient.”
“Because there are two semidetached in River Street, just finished, that look very pretty and roomy. I thought when I saw them that one of them might be what you would like.”
“Thank you,” he said, and tried not to say it curtly.
“They belong to White, the grocer. River Street isn’t East Elgin, but it is that way, and it would be a great deal pleasanter for—for her.”
“I must consider that, of course. You haven’t been in them? I should hope for a bright sitting-room, and a very private study.”
If Advena was aware of any unconscious implication, the pair of eyes she turned upon him showed no trace of satisfaction in it.
“No, I haven’t. But if I could be of any use I should be very glad to go over them with you, and—”
She stopped involuntarily, checked by the embarrassment in his face, though she had to wait for his words to explain it.
“I should be most grateful. But—but might it not be misunderstood?”
She bent her head over her work, and one of those instants passed between them which he had learned to dread. They were so completely the human pair as they sat together, withdrawn in comfort and shelter, absorbed in homely matters and in each other; it was easy to forget that they were only a picture, a sham, and that the reality lay further on, in the early spring. It must have been hard for him to hear without resentment that she was ready to help him to make a home for that reality. He was fast growing instructed in women, although by a post-graduate course.
Advena looked up. “Possibly,” she said, calmly, and their agitation lay still between them. He was silently angry; the thing that stirred without their leave had been sweet.
“No,” said Advena, “I can’t go, I suppose. I’m sorry. I should have liked so much to be of use.” She looked up at him appealingly, and sudden tears came and stood in her eyes, and would perhaps have undone his hurt but that he was staring into the fire.
“How can you be of use,” he said, almost irritably, “in such ways as those? They are not important, and I am not sure that for us they are legitimate. If you were about to be—married”—he seemed to plunge at the word—“I should not wish either to hasten you or to house you. I should turn my back on it all. You should have nothing from me,” he went on, with a forced smile, “but my blessing, delivered over my shoulder.”
“I am sure they are not important,” she said humbly—privately all unwilling to give up her martyrdom, “but surely they are legitimate. I would like to help you in every little way I can. Don’t you like me in your life? You have said that I may stay.”
“I believe you think that by taking strong measures one can exorcise things,” he said. “That if we could only write out this history of ours in our hearts’ blood it would somehow vanish.”
“No,” she said, “but I should like to do it all the same.”
“You must bear with me if I refuse the heroic in little. It is even harder than the other.” He broke off, leaning back and looking at her from under his shading hand as if that might protect him from too complete a vision. The firelight was warm on her cheek and hair, her needle once again completed the dear delusion: she sat there, his wife. This was an aspect he forbade, but it would return; here it was again.
“It is good to have you in my life,” he said. “It is also good to recognize one’s possibilities.”
“How can you definitely lose me?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t know. Now that I have found you it is as if you and I had been rocked together on the tide of that inconceivable ocean that casts us half-awake upon life,” he said dreamily. “It isn’t friendship of ideas, it’s a friendship of spirit. Indeed, I hope and pray never wholly to lose that.”
“You never will,” she told him. “How many worlds one lives in as the day goes by with the different people one cares for—one beyond the other, concentric, ringing from the heart! Yours comprises all the others; it lies the farthest out—and alas! at present, the closest in,” she added irresistibly to the asking of his eyes.
“But,” she hurried on, taking high ground to remedy her indiscretion, “I look forward to the time when this—other feeling of ours will become just an idea, as it is now just an emotion, at which we should try to smile. It is the attitude of the gods.”
“And therefore not becoming to men. Why should we, not being gods. borrow their attitude?” said Finlay.
“I could never kill it,” she put her work in her lap to say, “by any sudden act of violence. It would seem a kind of suicide. While it rules it is like one’s life—absolute. But to isolate it—to place it beyond the currents from the heart—to look at it, and realize it, and conquer it for what it is—I don’t think it need take so very long. And then our friendship will be beautiful without reproach.”
“I sometimes fear there may not be time enough in life,” he said. “And if I find that I must simply go—to British Columbia, I think—those mining missions would give a man his chance against himself. There is splendid work to be done there, of a rough-and-ready kind that would make it puerile to spend time in self-questioning.”
She smiled as if at a violent boy. “We can do it. We can do it here,” she said. “May I quote another religion to you? ‘From purification there arises in the Yogi a thorough discernment of the cause and nature of the body, whereupon he loses that regard which others have for the bodily form.’ Then, if he loves, he loves in spirit and in truth. I look forward to the time,” she went on calmly, “when the best that I can give you or you can give me will ride upon a glance.”
“I used to feel more drawn to the ascetic achievement and its rewards,” he remarked thoughtfully, “than I do now.”
“If I were not a Presbyterian in Canada,” she told him, “I would be a Buddhist in Burma. But I have inherited the Shorter Catechism; I must remain without the Law.”
Finlay smiled. “They are the simple,” he said. “Our Law makes wise the simple.”
Advena looked for a moment into the fire. She was listening, with admiration, to her heart; she would not be led to consider esoteric contrasts of East and West.
“Isn’t there something that appeals to you,” she said, “in the thought of just leaving it, all unsaid and all undone, a dear and tender projection upon the future that faded—a lovely thing we turned away from, until one day it was no longer there?”
“Charming,” he said, averting his eyes so that she should not see the hunger in them. “Charming—literature!”
She smiled and sighed, and he wrenched his mind to the consideration of the Buddhism of Browning. She followed him obediently, but the lines they wanted did not come easily; they were compelled to search and verify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly, realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight. They looked for verses to prove that Browning’s imagination carried him bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.
And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management, and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. “Would it be the heroic-in-little,” she begged, “to let me mend that?”
As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan for his admonition. “‘What then art thou doing here, O imagination?’” he groaned in his private heart. “‘Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I am not angry with thee, only go away!’”
Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire would be bad for her lover’s political prospects till she made him feel his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her own comfort in the family circle, Mr Milburn having grown by this time quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of the ring—imagine, for an instant, if she had been wearing it now! She would have banished Lorne altogether if she could. As he insisted on an occasional meeting, she clothed it in mystery, appointing it for an evening when her mother and aunt were out, and answering his ring at the door herself. To her family she remarked with detachment that you saw hardly anything of Lorne Murchison now, he was so taken up with his old election; and to Hesketh she confided her fear that politics did interfere with friendship, whatever he might say. He said a good deal, he cited lofty examples; but the only agreement he could get from her was the hope that the estrangement wouldn’t be permanent.
“But you are going to say something, Lorne,” she insisted, talking of the Jordanville meeting.
“Not much,” he told her. “It’s the safest district we’ve got, and they adore old Farquharson. He’ll do most of the talking—they wouldn’t thank me for taking up the time. Farquharson is going to tell them I’m a first-class man, and they couldn’t do better, and I’ve practically only to show my face and tell them I think so too.”
“But Mr Hesketh will speak?”
“Yes; we thought it would be a good chance of testing him. He may interest them, and he can’t do much harm, anyhow.”
“Lorne, I should simply love to go. It’s your first meeting.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Mr Murchison, HAVE you taken leave of your senses? Really, you are—”
“All right, I’ll send you. Farquharson and I are going out to the Crow place to supper, but Hesketh is driving straight there. He’ll be delighted to bring you—who wouldn’t?”
“I shouldn’t be allowed to go with him alone,” said Dora, thoughtfully.
“Well, no. I don’t know that I’d approve of that myself,” laughed the confident young man. “Hesketh is driving Mrs Farquharson, and the cutter will easily hold three. Isn’t it lucky there’s sleighing?”
“Mother couldn’t object to that,” said Dora. “Lorne, I always said you were the dearest fellow! I’ll wear a thick veil, and not a soul will know me.”
“Not a soul would in any case,” said Lorne. “It’ll be a Jordanville crowd, you know—nobody from Elgin.”
“We don’t visit much in Jordanville, certainly. Well, Mother mayn’t object. She has a great idea of Mrs Farquharson, because she has attended eleven Drawing-Rooms at Ottawa, and one of them was given—held, I should say—by the Princess Louise.”
“I won’t promise you eleven,” said Lorne, “but there seems to be a pretty fair chance of one or two.”
At this she had a tale for him which charmed his ears. “I didn’t know where to look,” she said. “Aunt Emmie, you know, has a very bad trick of coming into my room without knocking. Well, in she walked last night, and found me before the glass PRACTISING MY CURTSEY! I could have killed her. Pretended she thought I was out.”
“Dora, would you like ME to promise something?” he asked, with a mischievous look.
“Of course, I would. I don’t care how much YOU promise. What?”
But already he repented of his daring, and sat beside her suddenly conscious and abashed. Nor could any teasing prevail to draw from him what had been on his audacious lips to say.
Social precedents are easily established in the country. The accident that sent the first Liberal canvasser for Jordanville votes to the Crow place for his supper would be hard to discover now; the fact remains that he has been going there ever since. It made a greater occasion than Mrs Crow would ever have dreamed of acknowledging. She saw to it that they had a good meal of victuals, and affected indifference to the rest; they must say their say, she supposed. If the occasion had one satisfaction which she came nearer to confessing than another, it was that the two or three substantial neighbours who usually came to meet the politicians left their wives at home, and that she herself, to avoid giving any offence on this score, never sat down with the men. Quite enough to do it was, she would explain later, for her and the hired girl to wait on them and to clear up after them. She and Bella had their bite afterward when the men had hitched up, and when they could exchange comments of proud congratulation upon the inroads on the johnny-cake or the pies. So there was no ill feeling, and Mrs Crow, having vindicated her dignity by shaking hands with the guests of the evening in the parlour, solaced it further by maintaining the masculine state of the occasion, in spite of protests or entreaties. To sit down opposite Mr Crow would have made it ordinary “company”; she passed the plates and turned it into a function.
She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the yard with the horses. She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life. Her wiry hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting: you could tell by the look of them that they were not often crossed there. They were strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long, and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that would have given a phrenologist his opportunity. It was a different Mrs Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs Crow, the sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.
The room was heated to express the geniality that was harder to put in words. The window was shut; there was a smell of varnish and whatever was inside the “suite” of which Mrs Crow occupied the sofa. Enlarged photographs—very much enlarged—of Mr and Mrs Crow hung upon the walls, and one other of a young girl done in that process which tells you at once that she was an only daughter and that she is dead. There had been other bereavements; they were written upon the silver coffin-plates which, framed and glazed, also contributed to the decoration of the room; but you would have had to look close, and you might feel a delicacy.
Mrs Crow made her greetings with precision, and sat down again upon the sofa for a few minutes’ conversation.
“I’m telling them,” said her husband, “that the sleighin’s just held out for them. If it ‘ud been tomorrow they’d have had to come on wheels. Pretty soft travellin’ as it was, some places, I guess.”
“Snow’s come early this year,” said Mrs Crow. “It was an open fall, too.”
“It has certainly,” Mr Farquharson backed her up. “About as early as I remember it. I don’t know how much you got out here; we had a good foot in Elgin.”
“‘Bout the same, ‘bout the same,” Mr Crow deliberated, “but it’s been layin’ light all along over Clayfield way—ain’t had a pair of runners out, them folks.”
“Makes a more cheerful winter, Mrs Crow, don’t you think, when it comes early?” remarked Lorne. “Or would you rather not get it till after Christmas?”
“I don’t know as it matters much, out here in the country. We don’t get a great many folks passin’, best of times. An’ it’s more of a job to take care of the stock.”
“That’s so,” Mr Crow told them. “Chores come heavier when there’s snow on the ground, a great sight, especially if there’s drifts.”
And for an instant, with his knotted hands hanging between his knees he pondered this unvarying aspect of his yearly experience. They all pondered it, sympathetic.
“Well, now, Mr Farquharson,” Mrs Crow turned to him. “An’ how reely BE ye? We’ve heard better, an’ worse, an’ middlin’—there’s ben such contradictory reports.”
“Oh, very well, Mrs Crow. Never better. I’m going to give a lot more trouble yet. I can’t do it in politics, that’s the worst of it. But here’s the man that’s going to do it for me. Here’s the man!”
The Crows looked at the pretendant, as in duty bound, but not any longer than they could help.
“Why, I guess you were at school with Elmore?” said Crow, as if the idea had just struck him.
“He may be right peart, for all that,” said Elmore’s mother, and Elmore, himself, entering with two leading Liberals of Jordanville, effected a diversion, under cover of which Mrs Crow escaped, to superintend, with Bella, the last touches to the supper in the kitchen.
Politics in and about Jordanville were accepted as a purely masculine interest. If you had asked Mrs Crow to take a hand in them she would have thanked you with sarcasm, and said she thought she had about enough to do as it was. The school-house, on the night of such a meeting as this, was recognized to be no place for ladies. It was a man’s affair, left to the men, and the appearance there of the other sex would have been greeted with remark and levity. Elgin, as we know, was more sophisticated in every way, plenty of ladies attended political meetings in the Drill Shed, where seats as likely as not would be reserved for them; plenty of handkerchiefs waved there for the encouragement of the hero of the evening. They did not kiss him; British phlegm, so far, had stayed that demonstration at the southern border.
The ladies of Elgin, however, drew the line somewhere, drew it at country meetings. Mrs Farquharson went with her husband because, since his state of health had handed him over to her more than ever, she saw it a part of her wifely duty. His retirement had been decided upon for the spring, but she would be on hand to retire him at any earlier moment should the necessity arise. “We’ll be the only female creatures there, my dear,” she had said to Dora on the way out, and Hesketh had praised them both for public spirit. He didn’t know, he said, how anybody would get elected in England without the ladies, especially in the villages, where the people were obliged to listen respectfully.
“I wonder you can afford to throw away all the influence you get in the rural districts with soup and blankets,” he said; “but this is an extravagant country in many ways.” Dora kept silence, not being sure of the social prestige bound up with the distribution of soup and blankets, but Mrs Farquharson set him sharply right.
“I guess we’d rather do without our influence if it came to that,” she said.
Hesketh listened with deference to her account of the rural district which had as yet produced no Ladies Bountiful, made mental notes of several points, and placed her privately as a woman of more than ordinary intelligence. I have always claimed for Hesketh an open mind; he was filling it now, to its capacity, with care and satisfaction.
The schoolroom was full and waiting when they arrived. Jordanville had been well billed, and the posters held, in addition to the conspicuous names of Farquharson and Murchison, that of Mr Alfred Hesketh (of London, England). There was a “send-off” to give to the retiring member, there was a critical inspection to make of the new candidate, and there was Mr Alfred Hesketh, of London, England, and whatever he might signify. They were big, quiet, expectant fellows, with less sophistication and polemic than their American counterparts, less stolid aggressiveness than their parallels in England, if they have parallels there. They stood, indeed, for the development between the two; they came of the new country but not of the new light; they were democrats who had never thrown off the monarch—what harm did he do there overseas? They had the air of being prosperous, but not prosperous enough for theories and doctrines. The Liberal vote of South Fox had yet to be split by Socialism or Labour. Life was a decent rough business that required all their attention; there was time enough for sleep but not much for speculation. They sat leaning forward with their hats dropped between their knees, more with the air of big schoolboys expecting an entertainment than responsible electors come together to approve their party’s choice. They had the uncomplaining bucolic look, but they wore it with a difference; the difference, by this time, was enough to mark them of another nation. Most of them had driven to the meeting; it was not an adjournment from the public house. Nor did the air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider, and the room was full of patient good will.
The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had supped with the speakers, and Mr Crow had given him a friendly hint that the boys wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of trimmings from HIM. Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr Farquharson. It diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate by their own schoolhouse. He approached them, as he had always done on the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual friendly business. “You know and I know,” he said more than once; they and he knew a number of things together.
He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn’t chased him out of politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the main heads of that attractive prospect and, agreeable as the subject, great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his successor for this constituency, Mr Lorne Murchison, and by his friend from the old country, Mr Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take the words out of the mouths of these gentlemen, much as he envied them the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that illustrious body of literary and scientific men, had a custom, on the death of a member and the selection of his successor, of appointing one of their number to eulogize the newcomer. The person upon whom the task would most appropriately fall, did circumstances permit, would be the departing academician. In this case, he was happy to say, circumstances did permit—his political funeral was still far enough off to enable him to express his profound confidence in and his hearty admiration of the young and vigorous political heir whom the Liberals of South Fox had selected to stand in his shoes. Mr Farquharson proceeded to give his grounds for this confidence and admiration, reminding the Jordanville electors that they had met Mr Murchison as a Liberal standard-bearer in the last general election, when he, Farquharson, had to acknowledge very valuable services on Mr Murchison’s part. The retiring member then thanked his audience for the kind attention and support they had given him for so many years, made a final cheerful joke about a Pagan divinity known as Anno Domini, and took his seat.
They applauded him, and it was plain that they regretted him, the tried friend, the man there was never any doubt about, whose convictions they had repeated, and whose speeches in Parliament they had read with a kind of proprietorship for so long. The Chair had to wait, before introducing Mr Alfred Hesketh, until the backbenchers had got through with a double rendering of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which bolder spirits sent lustily forth from the anteroom where the little girls kept their hats and comforters, interspersed with whoops. Hesketh, it had been arranged, should speak next, and Lorne last.
Mr Hesketh left his wooden chair with smiling ease, the ease which is intended to level distinctions and put everybody concerned on the best of terms. He said that though he was no stranger to the work of political campaigns, this was the first time that he had had the privilege of addressing a colonial audience. “I consider,” said he handsomely, “that it is a privilege.” He clasped his hands behind his back and threw out his chest.
“Opinions have differed in England as to the value of the colonies, and the consequence of colonials. I say here with pride that I have ever been among those who insist that the value is very high and the consequence very great. The fault is common to humanity, but we are, I fear, in England, too prone to be led away by appearances, and to forget that under a rough unpolished exterior may beat virtues which are the brightest ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from the Algonquins and the—and the other savages—may be hidden the most glorious period of the British race.”
Mr Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality as it offered itself to them—it was a thing new and strange. Far out in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all the summer, Hesketh’s would have been a voice from home; but here, in long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.
“If we in England,” Hesketh proceeded, “required a lesson—as perhaps we did—in the importance of the colonies, we had it; need I remind you? in the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and victories to the British cause.”
Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive comment “Yah!”
Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation—
What should they know of EnglandWho only England know?
which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear. His audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment. The same voice from the anteroom inquired ironically, “That so?” and the speaker felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.
He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had at heart—the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the mother country. He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having shown themselves capable of this great function—a point at which he was again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother country in time of war. Here he quoted a noble lord. He said that he believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to have nothing to do with it.
“England,” he said, loftily, “has no wish to buy the loyalty of her colonies, nor, I hope, has any colony the desire to offer her allegiance at the price of preference in British markets. Even proposals for mutual commercial benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier principles than those of the market-place and the counting-house.”
At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher commercial plane, exclaimed, “How be ye goin’ to get ‘em kept to, then?”
Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the audience asked how they were to ensure that such arrangements would be adhered to. His answer was in the words of the Duke of Dartmoor, “By the mutual esteem, the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of the British race.”
Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless, at his own incapacity to follow this high doctrine, exclaimed intemperately, “Oh, shut up!” and the gathering, remembering that this, after all, was not what it had come for, began to hint that it had had enough in intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for “Murchison!”
Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer. He had a trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he thought they would take as a direct message from the distinguished nobleman who had uttered it. The Marquis of Aldeburgh was the father of the pithy thing, which he had presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The audience received it with respect—Hesketh’s own respect was so marked—but with misapprehension; there had been too many allusions to the nobility for a community so far removed from its soothing influence. “Had ye no friends among the commoners?” suddenly spoke up a dry old fellow, stroking a long white beard; and the roar that greeted this showed the sense of the meeting. Hesketh closed with assurances of the admiration and confidence he felt toward the candidate proposed to their suffrages by the Liberal party that were quite inaudible, and sought his yellow pinewood schoolroom chair with rather a forced smile. It had been used once before that day to isolate conspicuous stupidity.
They were at bottom a good-natured and a loyal crowd, and they had not, after all, come there to make trouble, or Mr Alfred Hesketh might have carried away a worse opinion of them. As it was, young Murchison, whose address occupied the rest of the evening, succeeded in making an impression upon them distinct enough, happily for his personal influence, to efface that of his friend. He did it by the simple expedient of talking business, and as high prices for produce and low ones for agricultural implements would be more interesting there than here, I will not report him. He and Mr Farquharson waited, after the meeting, for a personal word with a good many of those present, but it was suggested to Hesketh that the ladies might be tired, and that he had better get them home without unnecessary delay. Mrs Farquharson had less comment to offer during the drive home than Hesketh thought might be expected from a woman of her intelligence, but Miss Milburn was very enthusiastic. She said he had made a lovely speech, and she wished her father could have heard it.
A personal impression, during a time of political excitement, travels unexpectedly far. A week later Mr Hesketh was concernedly accosted in Main Street by a boy on a bicycle.
“Say, mister, how’s the dook?”
“What duke?” asked Hesketh, puzzled.
“Oh, any dook,” responded the boy, and bicycled cheerfully, away.