Christmas came and went. Dr Drummond had long accepted the innovation of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive by his business instinct, in everything but theology, where perhaps his business instinct also operated the other way, in favour of the sure thing. The Christmas Day service soon became one of those “special” occasions so dear to his heart, which made a demand upon him out of the ordinary way. He rose to these on the wing of the eagle, and his congregation never lacked the lesson that could be most dramatically drawn from them. His Christmas Day discourse gathered everything into it that could emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints’ days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and principle relentlessly indicated.
Dr Drummond loved, as I have said, all that asked for notable comment; the poet and the tragedian in him caught at the opportunity, and revelled in it. Public events carried him far, especially if they were disastrous, but what he most profited by was the dealing of Providence with members of his own congregation. Of all the occasions that inspired him, the funeral sermon was his happiest opportunity, nor was it, in his hands, by any means unstinted eulogy. Candid was his summing-up, behind the decent veil, the accepted apology of death; he was not afraid to refer to the follies of youth or the weaknesses of age in terms as unmistakable as they were kindly.
“Grace,” he said once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, “did more for her than ever nature had done.” He repeated it, too. “She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature,” and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice when the loss he deplored was that of a youth of virtue and promise, or that of a personal friend. His very text would be a blow upon the heart; the eyes filled from the beginning. People would often say that they were “sorry for the family,” sitting through Dr Drummond’s celebration of their bereavement; and the sympathy was probably well founded. But how fine he was when he paid the last tribute to that upright man, his elder and office-bearer, David Davidson! How his words marched, sorrowing to the close! “Much I have said of him, and more than he would have had me say.” Will it not stay with those who heard it till the very end, the trenchant, mournful fall of that “more than he would have had me say”?
It was a thing that Hugh Finlay could not abide in Dr Drummond.
As the winter passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr Drummond liked a pretty definite parallel; he had small opinion of the practice of drawing a pint out of a thimble, as he considered Finlay must have done when he preached the gospel of imperialism from Deuteronomy XXX, 14. “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” Moreover, to preach politics in Knox Church was a liberty in Finlay.
The fact that Finlay had been beforehand with him operated perhaps to reconcile the Doctor to his difficulty; and the candidature of one of his own members in what was practically the imperial interest no doubt increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless, he would not lose sight of the matter for more than two or three weeks together. Many an odd blow he delivered for its furtherance by way of illustrating higher things, and he kept it always, so to speak, in the practical politics of the long prayer.
It was Sunday evening, and Abby and her husband, as usual, had come to tea. The family was complete with the exception of Lorne, who had driven out to Clayfield with Horace Williams, to talk over some urgent matters with persons whom he would meet at supper at the Metropole Hotel at Clayfield. It was a thing Mrs Murchison thought little short of scandalous—supper to talk business on the Sabbath day, and in a hotel, a place of which the smell about the door was enough to knock you down, even on a weekday. Mrs Murchison considered, and did not scruple to say so, that politics should be left alone on Sundays. Clayfield votes might be very important, but there were such things as commandments, she supposed. “It’ll bring no blessing,” she declared severely, eyeing Lorne’s empty place.
The talk about the lamplit table was, nevertheless, all of the election, blessed or unblessed. It was not in human nature that it shouldn’t be, as Mrs Murchison would have very quickly told you if you had found her inconsistent. There was reason in all things, as she frequently said.
“I hear,” Alec had told them, “that Octavius Milburn is going around bragging he’s got the Elgin Chamber of Commerce consolidated this time.”
“Against us?” exclaimed Stella; and her brother said, “Of course!”
“Those Milburns,” remarked Mrs Murchison, “are enough to make one’s blood boil. I met Mrs Milburn in the market yesterday; she’d been pricing Mrs Crow’s ducks, and they were just five cents too dear for her, and she stopped—wonderful thing for her—and had SUCH an amount to say about Lorne, and the honour it was, and the dear only knows what! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—and Octavius Milburn doing all he knew against him the whole time! That’s the Milburns! I cut her remarkably short,” Mrs Murchison added, with satisfaction, “and when she’d made up her mind she’d have to give that extra five cents for the ducks because there weren’t any others to be had, she went back and found I’d bought them.”
“Well done, Mother!” said Alec, and Oliver remarked that if those were today’s ducks they were too good for the Milburn crowd, a lot.
“I expect she wanted them, too,” remarked Stella. “They’ve got the only Mr Hesketh staying with them now. Miss Filkin’s in a great state of excitement.”
“I guess we can spare them Hesketh,” said John Murchison.
“He’s a lobster,” said Stella with fervour.
“He seems to bring a frost where he goes,” continued Abby’s husband, “in politics, anyhow. I hear Lorne wants to make a present of him to the other side, for use wherever they’ll let him speak longest. Is it true he began his speech out at Jordanville—‘Gentlemen—and those of you who are not gentlemen’?”
“Could he have meant Mrs Farquharson and Miss Milburn?” asked Mr Murchison quietly, when the derision subsided; and they laughed again.
“He told me,” said Advena, “that he proposed to convert Mr Milburn to the imperial policy.”
“He’ll have his job cut out for him,” said her father.
“For my part,” Abby told them, “I think the Milburns are beneath contempt. You don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something ABOUT them—not that we ever come in contact with them,” she continued with dignity. “I believe they used to be patients of Dr Henry’s till he got up in years, but they don’t call in Harry.”
“Maybe that’s what there is about them,” said Mr Murchison, innocently.
“Father’s made up his mind,” announced Dr Harry, and they waited, breathless. There could be only one point upon which Dr Henry could be dubitating at that moment.
“He’s going to vote for Lorne.”
“He’s a lovely old darling!” cried Stella. “Good for Dr Henry Johnson! I knew he would.”
The rest were silent with independence and gratification. Dr Henry’s Conservatism had been supposed to be invincible. Dr Harry they thought a fair prey to Murchison influence, and he had capitulated early, but he had never promised to answer for his father.
“Yes, he’s taken his time about it, and he’s consulted about all the known authorities,” said his son, humorously. “Went right back to the Manchester school to begin with—sat out on the verandah reading Cobden and Bright the whole summer; if anybody came for advice sent ‘em in to me. I did a trade, I tell you! He thought they talked an awful lot of sense, those fellows—from the English point of view. ‘D’ye mean to tell me,’ he’d say, ‘that a generation born and bred in political doctrine of that sort is going to hold on to the colonies at a sacrifice? They’d rather let ‘em go at a sacrifice!’ Well, then he got to reading the other side of the question, and old Ormiston lent him Parkin, and he lent old Ormiston Goldwin Smith, and then he subscribed to the Times for six months—the bill must have nearly bust him; and then the squire went over without waiting for him and without any assistance from the Times either; and finally—well, he says that if it’s good enough business for the people of England it’s good enough business for him. Only he keeps on worrying about the people of England, and whether they’ll make enough by it to keep them contented, till he can’t next month all right, he wants it to be distinctly understood that family connection has nothing to do with it.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” Advena said.
“But we’re just as much obliged,” remarked Stella.
“A lot of our church people are going to stay at home election day,” declared Abby; “they won’t vote for Lorne, and they won’t vote against imperialism, so they’ll just sulk. Silly, I call it.”
“Good enough business for us,” said Alec.
“Well, what I want to know is,” said Mrs Murchison, “whether you are coming to the church you were born and brought up in, Abby, or not, tonight? There’s the first bell.”
“I’m not going to any church.” said Abby. “I went this morning. I’m going home to my baby.”
“Your father and mother,” said Mrs Murchison, “can go twice a day, and be none the worse for it. By the way, Father, did you know old Mrs Parr was dead? Died this morning at four o’clock. They telephoned for Dr Drummond, and I think they had little to do, for he had been up with her half the night already, Mrs Forsyth told me.”
“Did he go?” asked Mr Murchison.
“He did not, for the very good reason that he knew nothing about it. Mrs Forsyth answered the telephone, and told them he hadn’t been two hours in his bed, and she wouldn’t get him out again for an unconscious deathbed, and him with bronchitis on him and two sermons to preach today.”
“I’ll warrant Mrs Forsyth caught it in the morning,” said John Murchison.
“That she did. The doctor was as cross as two sticks that she hadn’t had him out to answer the phone. ‘I just spoke up,’ she said, ‘and told him I didn’t see how he was going to do any good to the pour soul over a telephone wire.’ ‘It isn’t that,’ he said, ‘but I might have put them on to Peter Fratch for the funeral. We’ve never had an undertaker in the church before,’ he said; ‘he’s just come, and he ought to be supported. Now I expect it’s too late, they’ll have gone to Liscombe.’ He rang them up right away, but they had.”
“Dr Drummond can’t stand Liscombe,” said Alec, as they all laughed a little at the Doctor’s foible, all except Advena, who laughed a great deal. She laughed wildly, then weakly. “I wouldn’t—think it a pleasure—to be buried by Liscombe myself!” she cried hysterically, and then laughed again until the tears ran down her face, and she lay back in her chair and moaned, still laughing.
Mr and Mrs Murchison, Alec, Stella, and Advena made up the family party; Oliver, for reasons of his own, would attend the River Avenue Methodist Church that evening. They slipped out presently into a crisp white winter night. The snow was banked on both sides of the street. Spreading garden fir trees huddled together weighted down with it; ragged icicles hung from the eaves or lay in long broken fingers on the trodden paths. The snow snapped and tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness, and etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic, almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in upon its own soul of the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and the silence, for a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels or other strangers to mark with curiosity. Mr and Mrs Murchison were neither angels nor strangers; they looked at it and saw that the Peterson place was still standing empty, and that old Mr Fisher hadn’t finished his new porch before zero weather came to stop him.
The young people were well ahead; Mrs Murchison, on her husband’s arm, stepped along with the spring of an impetus undisclosed.
“Is it to be the Doctor tonight?” asked John Murchison. “He was so hoarse this morning I wouldn’t be surprised to see Finlay in the pulpit. They’re getting only morning services in East Elgin just now, while they’re changing the lighting arrangements.”
“Are they, indeed? Well, I hope they’ll change them and be done with it, for I can’t say I’m anxious for too much of their Mr Finlay in Knox Church.”
“Oh, you like the man well enough for a change, Mother!” John assured her.
“I’ve nothing to say against his preaching. It’s the fellow himself. And I hope we won’t get him tonight for, the way I feel now, if I see him gawking up the pulpit steps it’ll be as much as I can do to keep in my seat, and so I just tell you, John.”
“You’re a little out of patience with him, I see,” said Mr Murchison.
“And it would be a good thing if more than me were out of patience with him. There’s such a thing as too much patience, I’ve noticed.”
“I dare say,” replied her husband, cheerfully.
“If Advena were any daughter of mine she’d have less patience with him.”
“She’s not much like you,” assented the father.
“I must say I like a girl to have a little spirit if a man has none. And before I’d have him coming to the house week after week the way he has, I’d see him far enough.”
“He might as well come there as anywhere,” Mr Murchison replied, ambiguously. “I suppose he has now and then time on his hands?”
“Well, he won’t have it on his hands much longer.”
“He won’t, eh?”
“No, he won’t,” Mrs Murchison almost shook the arm she was attached to. “John, I think you might show a little interest! The man’s going to be married.”
“You don’t say that?” John Murchison’s tone expressed not only astonishment but concern. Mrs Murchison was almost mollified.
“But I do say it. His future wife is coming here to Elgin next month, she and her aunt, or her grandmother, or somebody, and they’re to stay at Dr Drummond’s and be married as soon as possible.”
“Nonsense,” said Mr Murchison, which was his way of expressing simple astonishment.
“There’s no nonsense about it. Advena told me herself this afternoon.”
“Did she seem put out about it?”
“She’s not a girl to show it,” Mrs Murchison hedged, “if she was. I just looked at her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a piece of news. When did you hear it?’ I said. ‘Oh, I’ve known it all the winter!’ says my lady. What I wanted to say was that for an engaged man he had been pretty liberal with his visits, but she had such a queer look in her eyes I couldn’t express myself, somehow.”
“It was just as well left unsaid,” her husband told her, thoughtfully.
“I’m not so sure,” Mrs Murchison retorted. “You’re a great man, John, for letting everything alone. When he’s been coming here regularly for more than a year, putting ideas into the girl’s head—”
“He seems to have told her how things were.”
“That’s all very well—if he had kept himself to himself at the same time.”
“Well, Mother, you know you never thought much of the prospect.”
“No, I didn’t,” Mrs Murchison said. “It wouldn’t be me that would be married to him, and I’ve always said so. But I’d got more or less used to it,” she confessed. “The man’s well enough in some ways. Dear knows there would be a pair of them—one’s as much of a muddler as the other! And anybody can see with half an eye that Advena likes him. It hasn’t turned out as I expected, that’s a fact, John, and I’m just very much annoyed.”
“I’m not best pleased about it myself,” said John Murchison, expressing, as usual, a very small proportion of the regret that he felt, “but I suppose they know their own business.”
Thus, in their different ways, did these elder ones also acknowledge their helplessness before the advancing event. They could talk of it in private and express their dissatisfaction with it, and that was all they could do. It would not be a matter much further turned over between them at best. They would be shy of any affair of sentiment in terms of speech, and from one that affected a member of the family, self-respect would help to pull them the other way. Mrs Murchison might remember it in the list of things which roused her vain indignation; John Murchison would put it away in the limbo of irremediables that were better forgotten. For the present they had reached the church door.
Mrs Murchison saw with relief that Dr Drummond occupied his own pulpit, but if her glance had gone the length of three pews behind her she would have discovered that Hugh Finlay made one of the congregation. Fortunately, perhaps, for her enjoyment of the service, she did not look round. Dr Drummond was more observing, but his was a position of advantage. In the accustomed sea of faces two, heavy shadowed and obstinately facing fate, swam together before Dr Drummond, and after he had lifted his hands and closed his eyes for the long prayer he saw them still. So that these words occurred, near the end, in the long prayer—
“O Thou Searcher of hearts, who hast known man from the beginning, to whom his highest desires and his loftiest intentions are but as the desires and intentions of a little child, look with Thine own compassion, we beseech Thee, upon souls before Thee in any peculiar difficulty. Our mortal life is full of sin, it is also full of the misconception of virtue. Do Thou clear the understanding, O Lord, of such as would interpret Thy will to their own undoing; do Thou teach them that as happiness may reside in chastening, so chastening may reside in happiness. And though such stand fast to their hurt, do Thou grant to them in Thine own way, which may not be our way, a safe issue out of the dangers that beset them.”
Dr Drummond had his own method of reconciling foreordination and free will. To Advena his supplication came with that mysterious double emphasis of chance words that fit. Her thought played upon them all through the sermon, rejecting and rejecting again their application and their argument and the spring of hope in them. She, too, knew that Finlay was in church and, half timidly, she looked back for him, as the congregation filed out again into the winter streets. But he, furious, and more resolved than ever, had gone home by another way.
Octavius Milburn was not far beyond the facts when he said that the Elgin Chamber of Commerce was practically solid this time against the Liberal platform, though to what extent this state of things was due to his personal influence might be a matter of opinion. Mr Milburn was President of the Chamber of Commerce, and his name stood for one of the most thriving of Elgin’s industries, but he was not a person of influence except as it might be represented in a draft on the Bank of British North America. He had never converted anybody to anything, and never would, possibly because the governing principle of his life was the terror of being converted to anything himself. If an important nonentity is an imaginable thing, perhaps it would stand for Mr Milburn; and he found it a more valuable combination than it may appear, since his importance gave him position and opportunity, and his nonentity saved him from their risks. Certainly he had not imposed his view upon his fellow-members—they would have blown it off like a feather—yet they found themselves much of his mind. Most of them were manufacturing men of the Conservative party, whose factories had been nursed by high duties upon the goods of outsiders, and few even of the Liberals among them felt inclined to abandon this immediate safeguard for a benefit more or less remote, and more or less disputable. John Murchison thought otherwise, and put it in few words as usual. He said he was more concerned to see big prices in British markets for Canadian crops than he was to put big prices on ironware he couldn’t sell. He was more afraid of hard times among the farmers of Canada than he was of competition by the manufacturers of England. That is what he said when he was asked if it didn’t go against the grain a little to have to support a son who advocated low duties on British ranges; and when he was not asked he said nothing, disliking the discount that was naturally put upon his opinion. Parsons, of the Blanket Mills, bolted at the first hint of the new policy and justified it by reminding people that he always said he would if it ever looked like business.
“We give their woollen goods a pull of a third as it is,” he said, “which is just a third more than I approve of. I don’t propose to vote to make it any bigger—can’t afford it.”
He had some followers, but there were also some, like Young, of the Plough Works, and Windle, who made bicycles, who announced that there was no need to change their politics to defeat a measure that had no existence, and never would have. What sickened them, they declared, was to see young Murchison allowed to give it so much prominence as Liberal doctrine. The party had been strong enough to hold South Fox for the best part of the last twenty years on the old principles, and this British boot-licking feature wasn’t going to do it any good. It was fool politics in the opinion of Mr Young and Mr Windle.
Then remained the retail trades, the professions, and the farmers. Both sides could leave out of their counsels the interests of the leisured class, since the leisured class in Elgin consisted almost entirely of persons who were too old to work, and therefore not influential. The landed proprietors were the farmers, when they weren’t, alas! the banks. As to the retail men, the prosperity of the stores of Main Street and Market Street was bound up about equally with that of Fox County and the Elgin factories. The lawyers and doctors, the odd surveyors and engineers, were inclined, by their greater detachment, to theories and prejudices, delightful luxuries where a certain rigidity of opinion is dictated by considerations of bread and butter. They made a factor debatable, but small. The farmers had everything to win, nothing to lose. The prospect offered them more for what they had to sell, and less for what they had to buy, and most of them were Liberals already; but the rest had to be convinced, and a political change of heart in a bosom of South Fox was as difficult as any other. Industrial, commercial, professional, agricultural, Lorne Murchison scanned them all hopefully, but Walter Winter felt them his garnered sheaves.
It will be imagined how Mr Winter, as a practical politician, rejoiced in the aspect of things. The fundamental change, with its incalculable chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in politics—and if there was a weapon Mr Winter owned a weakness for it was satire—the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him down to the ground. He professed himself, though no optimist under any circumstances very well pleased. Only in one other place, he declared, would he have preferred to conduct a campaign at the present moment on the issue involved, though he would have to change his politics to do it there, and that place was England. He cast an envious eye across the ocean at the trenchant argument of the dear loaf; he had no such straight road to the public stomach and grand arbitrator of the fate of empires. If the Liberals in England failed to turn out the Government over this business, they would lose in his eyes all the respect he ever had for them, which wasn’t much, he acknowledged. When his opponents twitted him with discrepancy here, since a bargain so bad for one side could hardly fail to favour the other, he poured all his contempt on the scheme as concocted by damned enthusiasts for the ruin of businessmen of both countries. Such persons, Mr Winter said, if they could have their way, would be happy and satisfied; but in his opinion neither England nor the colonies could afford to please them as much as that. He professed loud contempt for the opinions of the Conservative party organs at Toronto, and stood boldly for his own views. That was what would happen, he declared, in every manufacturing division in the country, if the issue came to be fought in a general election. He was against the scheme, root and branch.
Mr Winter was skilled, practised, and indefatigable. We need not follow him in all his ways and works; a good many of his arguments, I fear, must also escape us. The Elgin Mercury, if consulted, would produce them in daily disclosure; so would the Clayfield Standard. One of these offered a good deal of sympathy to Mayor Winter, the veteran of so many good fights, in being asked to contest South Fox with an opponent who had not so much as a village reeveship to his public credit. If the Conservative candidate felt the damage to his dignity, however, he concealed it.
In Elgin and Clayfield, where factory chimneys had also begun to point the way to enterprise, Winter had a clear field. Official reports gave him figures to prove the great and increasing prosperity of the country, astonishing figures of capital coming in, of emigrants landing, of new lands broken, new mineral regions exploited, new railways projected, of stocks and shares normal safe, assured. He could ask the manufacturers of Elgin to look no further than themselves, which they were quite willing to do, for illustration of the plenty and the promise which reigned in the land from one end to the other. He could tell them that in their own Province more than one hundred new industries had been established in the last year. He could ask them, and he did ask them, whether this was a state of things to disturb with an inrush from British looms and rolling mills, and they told him with applause that it was not.
Country audiences were not open to arguments like these; they were slow in the country, as the Mercury complained, to understand that agricultural prospects were bound up with the prosperity of the towns and cities; they had been especially slow in the country in England, as the Express ironically pointed out, to understand it. So Winter and his supporters asked the farmers of South Fox if they were prepared to believe all they heard of the good will of England to the colonies, with the flattering assumption that they were by no means prepared to believe it. Was it a likely thing, Mr Winter inquired, that the people of Great Britain were going to pay more for their flour and their bacon, their butter and their cheese, than they had any need to do, simply out of a desire to benefit countries which most of them had never seen, and never would see? No, said Mr Winter, they might take it from him, that was not the idea. But Mr Winter thought there was an idea, and that they and he together would not have much trouble in deciphering it. He did not claim to be longer-sighted in politics than any other man, but he thought the present British idea was pretty plain. It was, in two words, to secure the Canadian market for British goods, and a handsome contribution from the Canadian taxpayer toward the expense of the British army and navy, in return for the offer of favours to food supplies from Canada. But this, as they all knew, was not the first time favours had been offered by the British Government to food supplies from Canada. Just sixty years ago the British Government had felt one of these spasms of benevolence to Canada, and there were men sitting before him who could remember the good will and the gratitude, the hope and the confidence, that greeted Stanley’s bill of that year, which admitted Canadian wheat and flour at a nominal duty. Some could remember, and those who could not remember could read; how the farmers and the millers of Ontario took heart and laid out capital, and how money was easy and enterprise was everywhere, and how agricultural towns such as Elgin was at that time sent up streets of shops to accommodate the trade that was to pour in under the new and generous “preference” granted to the Dominion by the mother country. And how long, Mr Winter demanded, swinging round in that pivotal manner which seems assisted by thumbs in the armholes of the waistcoat, how long did the golden illusion last? Precisely three years. In precisely three years the British nation compelled the British Government to adopt the Free Trade Act of ‘46. The wheat of the world flowed into every port in England, and the hopes of Canada, especially the hopes of Ontario, based then, as now, on “preferential” treatment, were blasted to the root. Enterprise was laid flat, mortgages were foreclosed, shops were left empty, the milling and forwarding interests were temporarily ruined, and the Governor-General actually wrote to the Secretary of State in England that things were so bad that not a shilling could be raised on the credit of the Province.
Now Mr Winter did not blame the people of England for insisting on free food. It was the policy that suited their interests, and they had just as good a right to look after their interests, he conceded handsomely, as anybody else. But he did blame the British Government for holding out hopes, for making definite pledges, to a young and struggling nation, which they must have known they would not be able to redeem. He blamed their action then, and he would blame it now, if the opportunity were given to them to repeat it, for the opportunity would pass and the pledge would pass into the happy hunting ground of unrealizable politics, but not—and Mr Winter asked his listeners to mark this very carefully—not until Canada was committed to such relations of trade and taxes with the Imperial Government as would require the most heroic efforts—it might run to a war—to extricate herself from. In plain words, Mr Winter assured his country audiences, Great Britain had sold them before, and she would sell them again. He stood there before them as loyal to British connection as any man. He addressed a public as loyal to British connection as any public. BUT—once bitten twice shy.
Horace Williams might riddle such arguments from end to end in the next day’s Express, but if there is a thing that we enjoy in the country, it is having the dodges of Government shown up with ignominy, and Mr Winter found his account in this historic parallel.
Nothing could have been more serious in public than his line of defence against the danger that menaced, but in friendly ears Mr Winter derided it as a practical possibility, like the Liberals, Young and Windle.
“It seems to me,” he said, talking to Octavius Milburn, “that the important thing at present is the party attitude to the disposition of Crown lands and to Government-made railways. As for this racket of Wallingham’s, it has about as much in it as an empty bun-bag. He’s running round taking a lot of satisfaction blowing it out just now, and the swells over there are clapping like anything, but the first knock will show that it’s just a bun-bag, with a hole in it.”
“Folks in the old country are solid on the buns, though,” said Milburn as they parted, and Alfred Hesketh, who was walking with his host, said—“It’s bound in the end to get down to that, isn’t it?”
Presently Hesketh came back to it.
“Quaint idea, that—describing Wallingham’s policy as a bun-bag,” he said, and laughed. “Winter is an amusing fellow.”
“Wallingham’s policy won’t even be a bun-bag much longer,” said Milburn. “It won’t be anything at all. Imperial union is very nice to talk about, but when you come down to hard fact it’s Australia for the Australians, Canada for the Canadians, Africa for the Africans, every time.”
“Each for himself, and devil take the hindmost,” said Hesketh; “and when the hindmost is England, as our friend Murchison declares it will be—”
“So much the worse for England,” said Milburn, amiably. “But we should all be sorry to see it and, for my part, I don’t believe such a thing is at all likely. And you may be certain of one thing,” he continued, impressively: “No flag but the Union Jack will ever wave over Canada.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that!” Hesketh responded. “Since I have heard more of your side of the question I am quite convinced that loyalty to England and complete commercial independence—I might say even commercial antagonism—may exist together in the colonies. It seems paradoxical, but it is true.”
Mr Hesketh had naturally been hearing a good deal more of Mr Milburn’s side of the question, staying as he was under Mr Milburn’s hospitable roof. It had taken the least persuasion in the world to induce him to make the Milburns a visit. He found them delightful people. He described them in his letters home as the most typically Canadian family he had met, quite simple and unconventional, but thoroughly warm-hearted, and touchingly devoted to far-away England. Politically he could not see eye to eye with Mr Milburn, but he could quite perceive Mr Milburn’s grounds for the view he held. One thing, he explained to his correspondents, you learned at once by visiting the colonies, and that was to make allowance for local conditions, both social and economic.
He and Mr Milburn had long serious discussions, staying behind in the dining-room to have them after tea, when the ladies took their fancy work into the drawing-room, and Dora’s light touch was heard upon the piano. It may be supposed that Hesketh brought every argument forward in favour of the great departure that had been conceived in England; he certainly succeeded in interesting his host very deeply in the English point of view. He had, however, to encounter one that was made in Canada—it resided in Mr Milburn as a stone might reside in a bag of wool. Mr Milburn wouldn’t say that this preference trade idea, if practicable, might not work out for the benefit of the Empire as a whole. That was a thing he didn’t pretend to know. But it wouldn’t work out for his benefit that was a thing he did know. When a man was confronted with a big political change the question he naturally asked himself was, “Is it going to be worth my while?” and he acted on the answer to that question. He was able to explain to Hesketh, by a variety of facts and figures, of fascinating interest to the inquiring mind, just how and where such a concern as the Milburn Boiler Company would be “hit” by the new policy, after which he asked his guest fairly, “Now, if you were in my shoes, would you see your way to voting for any such thing?”
“If I were in your shoes,” said Hesketh, thoughtfully, “I can’t say I would.”
On grounds of sentiment, Octavius assured him, they were absolutely at one, but in practical matters a man had to proceed on business principles. He went about at this time expressing great esteem for Hesketh’s capacity to assimilate facts. His opportunity to assimilate them was not curtailed by any further demand for his services in the South Fox campaign. He was as willing as ever, he told Lorne Murchison, to enlist under the flag, and not for the first time; but Murchison and Farquharson, and that lot, while grateful for the offer, seemed never quite able to avail themselves of it: the fact was all the dates were pretty well taken up. No doubt, Hesketh acknowledged, the work could be done best by men familiar with the local conditions, but he could not avoid the conviction that this attitude toward proffered help was very like dangerous trifling. Possibly these circumstances gave him an added impartiality for Mr Milburn’s facts. As the winter advanced his enthusiasm for the country increased with his intelligent appreciation of the possibilities of the Elgin boiler. The Elgin boiler was his object-lesson in the development of the colonies; he paid, several visits to the works to study it, and several times he thanked Mr Milburn for the opportunity of familiarizing himself with such an important and promising branch of Canadian industry.
“It looks,” said Octavius one evening in early February, “as if the Grits were getting a little anxious about South Fox—high time, too. I see Cruickshank is down to speak at Clayfield on the seventh, and Tellier is to be here for the big meeting at the opera house on the eleventh.”
“Tellier is Minister of Public Works, isn’t he?” asked Hesketh.
“Yes—and Cruickshank is an ex-Minister,” replied Mr Milburn. “Looks pretty shaky when they’ve got to take men like that away from their work in the middle of the session.”
“I shall be glad,” remarked his daughter Dora, “when this horrid election is over. It spoils everything.”
She spoke a little fretfully. The election and the matters it involved did interfere a good deal with her interest in life. As an occupation it absorbed Lorne Murchison even more completely than she occasionally desired; and as a topic it took up a larger share of the attention of Mr Alfred Hesketh than she thought either reasonable or pleasing. Between politics and boilers Miss Milburn almost felt at times that the world held a second place for her.
The progress of Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Christie Cameron up the river to Montreal, and so west to Elgin, was one series of surprises, most of them pleasant and instructive to such a pair of intelligent Scotchwomen, if we leave out the number of Roman Catholic churches that lift their special symbol along the banks of the St Lawrence and the fact that Hugh Finlay was not in Elgin to meet them upon their arrival. Dr Drummond, of course, was there at the station to explain. Finlay had been obliged to leave for Winnipeg only the day before, to attend a mission conference in place of a delegate who had been suddenly laid aside by serious illness. Finlay, he said, had been very loath to go, but there were many reasons why it was imperative that he should; Dr Drummond explained them all. “I insisted on it,” he assured them, frankly. “I told him I would take the responsibility.”
He seemed very capable of taking it, both the ladies must have thought, with his quick orders about the luggage and his waiting cab. Mrs Kilbannon said so. “I’m sure,” she told him, “we are better off with you than with Hugh. He was always a daft dependence at a railway station.”
They both—Mrs Kilbannon and Dr Drummond—looked out of the corners of their eyes, so to speak, at Christie, the only one who might be expected to show any sensitiveness; but Miss Cameron accepted the explanation with readiness. Indeed, she said, she would have been real vexed if Mr Finlay had stayed behind on her account—she showed herself well aware of the importance of a nomination, and the desirability of responding to it.
“It will just give me an opportunity of seeing the town,” she said, looking at it through the cab windows as they drove; and Dr Drummond had to admit that she seemed a sensible creature. Other things being equal, Finlay might be doing very well for himself. As they talked of Scotland—it transpired that Dr Drummond knew all the braes about Bross as a boy—he found himself more than ever annoyed with Finlay about the inequality of other things; and when they passed Knox Church and Miss Cameron told him she hadn’t realized it was so imposing an edifice, he felt downright sorry for the woman.
Dr Drummond had persuaded Finlay to go to Winnipeg with a vague hope that something in the fortnight’s grace thus provided, might be induced to happen. The form it oftenest took to his imagination was Miss Christie’s announcement, when she set foot upon the station platform, that she had become engaged, on the way over, to somebody else, some fellow-traveller. Such things, Dr Drummond knew, did come about, usually bringing distress and discomfiture in their train. Why, then, should they not happen when all the consequences would be rejoiceful?
It was plain enough, however, that nothing of the kind had come to pass. Miss Christie had arrived in Elgin, bringing her affections intact; they might have been in any one of her portmanteaux. She had come with definite calm intention, precisely in the guise in which she should have been expected. At the very hour, in the very clothes, she was there. Robust and pleasant, with a practical eye on her promising future, she had arrived, the fulfilment of despair. Dr Drummond looked at her with acquiescence, half-cowed, half-comic, wondering at his own folly in dreaming of anything else. Miss Cameron brought the situation, as it were, with her; it had to be faced, and Dr Drummond faced it like a philosopher. She was the material necessity, the fact in the case, the substantiation of her own legend; and Dr Drummond promptly gave her all the consideration she demanded in this aspect. Already he heard himself pronouncing a blessing over the pair—and they would make the best of it. With characteristic dispatch he decided that the marriage should take place the first Monday after Finlay’s return. That would give them time to take a day or two in Toronto, perhaps, and get back for Finlay’s Wednesday prayer meeting. “Or I could take it off his hands,” said Dr Drummond to himself. “That would free them till the end of the week.” Solicitude increased in him that the best should be made of it; after all, for a long time they had been making the worst. Mrs Forsyth, whom it had been necessary to inform when Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Cameron became actually imminent, saw plainly that the future Mrs Finlay had made a very good impression on the Doctor; and as nature, in Mrs Forsyth’s case, was more powerful than grace, she became critical accordingly. Still, she was an honest soul: she found more fault with what she called Miss Cameron’s “shirt-waists” than with Miss Cameron herself, whom she didn’t doubt to be a good woman though she would never see thirty-five again. Time and observation would no doubt mend or remodel the shirt-waists; and meanwhile both they and Miss Cameron would do very well for East Elgin, Mrs Forsyth avowed. Mrs Kilbannon, definitely given over to caps and curls as they still wear them in Bross, Mrs Forsyth at once formed a great opinion of. She might be something, Mrs Forsyth thought, out of a novel by Mr Crockett, and made you long to go to Scotland, where presumably everyone was like her. On the whole the ladies from Bross profited rather than lost by the new frame they stepped into in the house of Dr Drummond, of Elgin, Ontario. Their special virtues, of dignity and solidity and frugality, stood out saliently against the ease and unconstraint about them; in the profusion of the table it was little less than edifying to hear Mrs Kilbannon, invited to preserves, say, “Thank you, I have butter.” It was the pleasantest spectacle, happily common enough, of the world’s greatest inheritance. We see it in immigrants of all degrees, and we may perceive it in Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. They come in couples and in companies from those little imperial islands, bringing the crusted qualities of the old blood bottled there so long, and sink with grateful absorption into the wide bountiful stretches of the further countries. They have much to take, but they give themselves; and so it comes about that the Empire is summed up in the race, and the flag flies for its ideals.
Mrs Forsyth had been told of the approaching event; but neither Dr Drummond, who was not fond of making communications he did not approve of, nor the Murchisons, who were shy of the matter as a queer business which Advena seemed too much mixed up with, had mentioned it to anyone else. Finlay himself had no intimates, and moved into his new house in River Street under little comment. His doings excited small surprise, because the town knew too little about him to expect him to do one thing more than another. He was very significant among his people, very important in their lives but not, somehow, at any expense to his private self. He knew them, but they did not know him; and it is high praise of him that this was no grievance among them. They would tell you without resentment that the minister was a “very reserved” man; there might be even a touch of proper pride in it. The worshippers of Knox Church mission were rather a reserved lot themselves. It was different with the Methodists; plenty of expansion there.
Elgin, therefore, knew nothing, beyond the fact that Dr Drummond had two ladies from the old country staying with him, about whom particular curiosity would hardly be expected outside of Knox Church. In view of Finlay’s absence, Dr Drummond, consulting with Mrs Kilbannon, decided that for the present Elgin need not be further informed. There was no need, they agreed, to give people occasion to talk; and it would just be a nuisance to have to make so many explanations. Both Mrs Kilbannon and her niece belonged to the race that takes great satisfaction in keeping its own counsel. Their situation gained for them the further interest that nothing need be said about it; and the added importance of caution was plainly to be discerned in their bearing, even toward one another. It was a portentous business, this of marrying a minister, under the most ordinary circumstances, not to be lightly dealt with, and even more of an undertaking in a far new country where the very wind blew differently, and the extraordinary freedom of conversation made it more than ever necessary to take heed to what you were saying. So far as Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon were aware, the matter had not been “spoken of” elsewhere at all. Dr Drummond, remembering Advena Murchison’s acquaintance with it, had felt the weight of a complication, and had discreetly held his tongue. Mrs Kilbannon approved her nephew in this connection. “Hugh,” she said, “was never one to let on more than necessary.” It was a fine secret between Hugh, in Winnipeg, whence he had written all that was lawful or desirable, and themselves at Dr Drummond’s. Miss Cameron said it would give her more freedom to look about her.
In the midst of all this security, and on the very first day after their arrival, it was disconcerting to be told that a lady, whose name they had never heard before, had called to see Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. They had not even appeared at church, as they told one another with dubious glances. They had no reason whatever to expect visitors. Dr Drummond was in the cemetery burying a member; Mrs Forsyth was also abroad. “Now who in the world,” asked Mrs Kilbannon of Miss Cameron, “is Miss Murchison?”
“They come to our church,” said Sarah, in the door. “They’ve got the foundry. It’s the oldest one. She teaches.”
Sarah in the door was even more disconcerting than an unexpected visitor. Sarah invariably took them off their guard, in the door or anywhere. She freely invited their criticism, but they would not have known how to mend her. They looked at her now helplessly, and Mrs Kilbannon said, “Very well. We will be down directly.”
“It may be just some friendly body,” she said, as they descended the stairs together, “or it may be common curiosity. In that case we’ll disappoint it.”
Whatever they expected, therefore, it was not Advena. It was not a tall young woman with expressive eyes, a manner which was at once abrupt and easy, and rather a lounging way of occupying the corner of a sofa. “When she sat down,” as Mrs Kilbannon said afterward, “she seemed to untie and fling herself as you might a parcel.” Neither Mrs Kilbannon nor Christie Cameron could possibly be untied or flung, so perhaps they gave this capacity in Advena more importance than it had. But it was only a part of what was to them a new human demonstration, something to inspect very carefully and accept very cautiously—the product, like themselves, yet so suspiciously different, of these free airs and these astonishingly large ideas. In some ways, as she sat there in her graceful dress and careless attitude, asking them direct smiling questions about their voyage, she imposed herself as of the class whom both these ladies of Bross would acknowledge unquestioningly to be “above” them; in others she seemed to be of no class at all; so far she came short of small standards of speech and behaviour. The ladies from Bross, more and more confused, grew more and more reticent, when suddenly, out of a simple remark of Miss Cameron’s about missing in the train the hot-water cans they gave you “to your feet” in Scotland, reticence descended upon Miss Murchison also. She sat in an odd silence, looking at Miss Cameron, absorbed apparently in the need of looking at her, finding nothing to say, her flow of pleasant inquiry dried up, and all her soul at work, instead, to perceive the woman. Mrs Kilbannon was beginning to think better of her—it was so much more natural to be a little backward with strangers—when the moment passed. Their visitor drew herself out of it with almost a perceptible effort, and seemed to glance consideringly at them in their aloofness, their incommunicativeness, their plain odds with her. I don’t know what she expected; but we may assume that she was there simply to offer herself up, and the impulse of sacrifice seldom considers whether or not it may be understood. It was to her a normal, natural thing that a friend of Hugh Finlay’s should bring an early welcome to his bride; and to do the normal, natural thing at keen personal cost was to sound that depth, or rise to that height of the spirit where pain sustains. We know of Advena that she was prone to this form of exaltation. Those who feel themselves capable may pronounce whether she would have been better at home crying in her bedroom.
She decided badly—how could she decide well?—on what she would say to explain herself.
“I am so sorry,” she told them, “that Mr Finlay is obliged to be away.”
It was quite wrong; it assumed too much, her knowledge and their confidence, and the propriety of discussing Mr Finlay’s absence. There was even an unconscious hint of another kind of assumption in it—a suggestion of apology for Mr Finlay. Advena was aware of it even as it left her lips, and the perception covered her with a damning blush. She had a sudden terrified misgiving that her role was too high for her, that she had already cracked her mask. But she looked quietly at Miss Cameron and smiled across the tide that surged in her as she added, “He was very distressed at having to go.”
They looked at her in an instant’s blank astonishment. Miss Cameron opened her lips and closed them again, glancing at Mrs Kilbannon. They fell back together, but not in disorder. This was something much more formidable than common curiosity. Just what it was they would consider later; meanwhile Mrs Kilbannon responded with what she would have called cool civility.
“Perhaps you have heard that Mr Finlay is my nephew?” she said.
“Indeed I have. Mr Finlay has told me a great deal about you, Mrs Kilbannon, and about his life at Bross,” Advena replied. “And he has told me about you, too,” she went on, turning to Christie Cameron.
“Indeed?” said she.
“Oh, a long time ago. He has been looking forward to your arrival for some months, hasn’t he?”
“We took our passages in December,” said Miss Cameron.
“And you are to be married almost immediately, are you not?” Miss Murchison continued, pleasantly.
Mrs Kilbannon had an inspiration. “Could he by any means have had the banns cried?” she demanded of Christie, who looked piercingly at their visitor for the answer.
“Oh, no,” Advena laughed softly. “Presbyterians haven’t that custom over here—does it still exist anywhere? Mr Finlay told me himself.”
“Has he informed all his acquaintances?” asked Mrs Kilbannon. “We thought maybe his elders would be expecting to hear, or his Board of Management. Or he might have just dropped a word to his Sessions Clerk. But—”
Advena shook her head. “I think it unlikely,” she said.
“Then why would he be telling you?” inquired the elder lady, bluntly.
“He told me, I suppose, because I have the honour to be a friend of his,” Advena said, smiling. “But he is not a man, is he, who makes many friends? It is possible, I dare say, that he has mentioned it to no one else.”
Poor Advena! She had indeed uttered her ideal to unsympathetic ears—brought her pig, as her father would have said, to the wrong market. She sat before the ladies from Bross, Hugh Finlay’s only confidante. She sat handsome and upheld and not altogether penetrable, a kind of gipsy to their understanding, though indeed the Romany strain in her was beyond any divining of theirs. They, on their part, reposed in their clothes with all their bristles out—what else could have been expected of them?—convinced in their own minds that they had come not only to a growing but to a forward country.
Mrs Kilbannon was perhaps a little severe. “I wonder that we have not heard of you, Miss Murchison,” said she, “but we are happy to make the acquaintance of any of my nephew’s friends. You will have heard him preach, perhaps?”
“Often,” said Advena, rising. “We have no one here who can compare with him in preaching. There was very little reason why you should have heard of me. I am—of no importance.” She hesitated and fought for an instant with a trembling of the lip. “But now that you have been persuaded to be a part of our life here,” she said to Christie, “I thought I would like to come and offer you my friendship because it is his already. I hope—so much—that you will be happy here. It is a nice little place. And I want you to let me help you—about your house, and in every way that is possible. I am sure I can be of use.” She paused and looked at their still half-hostile faces. “I hope,” she faltered, “you don’t mind my—having come?”
“Not at all,” said Christie, and Mrs Kilbannon added, “I’m sure you mean it very kindly.”
A flash of the comedy of it shot up in Advena’s eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I do. Good-bye.”
If they had followed her departure they would have been further confounded to see her walk not quite steadily away; shaken with fantastic laughter. They looked instead at one another, as if to find the solution of the mystery where indeed it lay, in themselves.
“She doesn’t even belong to his congregation,” said Christie. “Just a friend, she said.”
“I expect the friendship’s mostly upon her side,” remarked Mrs Kilbannon. “She seemed frank enough about it. But I would see no necessity for encouraging her friendship on my own account, if I were in your place, Christie.”
“I think I’ll manage without it,” said Christie.