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The Imperialist

by Sara Jeannette Duncan · English · Gutenberg #5301 · 610,697 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Imperialist

Author: Sara Jeannette Duncan


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5301]
                Most recently updated: November 4, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5301

Credits: Produced by Gardner Buchanan, and David Widger


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Produced by Gardner Buchanan





THE IMPERIALIST


By Sara Jeannette Duncan, 1861-1922 (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)


1904




CHAPTER I

It would have been idle to inquire into the antecedents, or even the
circumstances, of old Mother Beggarlegs. She would never tell; the
children, at all events, were convinced of that; and it was only the
children, perhaps, who had the time and the inclination to speculate.
Her occupation was clear; she presided like a venerable stooping hawk,
over a stall in the covered part of the Elgin market-place, where she
sold gingerbread horses and large round gingerbread cookies, and brown
sticky squares of what was known in all circles in Elgin as taffy. She
came, it was understood, with the dawn; with the night she vanished,
spending the interval on a not improbable broomstick. Her gingerbread
was better than anybody’s; but there was no comfort in standing, first
on one foot and then on the other, while you made up your mind--the
horses were spirited and you could eat them a leg at a time, but there
was more in the cookies--she bent such a look on you, so fierce and
intolerant of vacillation. She belonged to the group of odd characters,
rarer now than they used to be, etched upon the vague consciousness of
small towns as in a way mysterious and uncanny; some said that Mother
Beggarlegs was connected with the aristocracy and some that she had been
“let off” being hanged. The alternative was allowed full swing, but in
any case it was clear that such persons contributed little to the common
good and, being reticent, were not entertaining. So you bought your
gingerbread, concealing, as it were, your weapons, paying your copper
coins with a neutral nervous eye, and made off to a safe distance,
whence you turned to shout insultingly, if you were an untrounced young
male of Elgin, “Old Mother Beggarlegs! Old Mother Beggarlegs!” And why
“Beggarlegs” nobody in the world could tell you. It might have been
a dateless waggery, or it might have been a corruption of some more
dignified surname, but it was all she ever got. Serious, meticulous
persons called her “Mrs” Beggarlegs, slightly lowering their voices and
slurring it, however, it must be admitted. The name invested her with
a graceless, anatomical interest, it penetrated her wizened black and
derisively exposed her; her name went far indeed to make her dramatic.
Lorne Murchison, when he was quite a little boy was affected by this
and by the unfairness of the way it singled her out. Moved partly by
the oppression of the feeling and partly by a desire for information
he asked her sociably one day, in the act of purchase, why the gilt was
generally off her gingerbread. He had been looking long, as a matter
of fact, for gingerbread with the gilt on it, being accustomed to the
phrase on the lips of his father in connection with small profits.
Mother Beggarlegs, so unaccustomed to politeness that she could not
instantly recognize it, answered him with an imprecation at which he,
no doubt, retreated, suddenly thrown on the defensive hurling the usual
taunt. One prefers to hope he didn’t, with the invincible optimism one
has for the behaviour of lovable people; but whether or not his kind
attempt at colloquy is the first indication I can find of that active
sympathy with the disabilities of his fellow-beings which stamped him
later so intelligent a meliorist. Even in his boy’s beginning he had a
heart for the work; and Mother Beggarlegs, but for a hasty conclusion,
might have made him a friend.

It is hard to invest Mother Beggarlegs with importance, but the date
helps me--the date I mean, of this chapter about Elgin; she was a person
to be reckoned with on the twenty-fourth of May. I will say at once, for
the reminder to persons living in England that the twenty-fourth of May
was the Queen’s Birthday. Nobody in Elgin can possibly have forgotten
it. The Elgin children had a rhyme about it--

   The twenty-fourth of May
      Is the Queen’s Birthday;
   If you don’t give us a holiday,
      We’ll all run away.

But Elgin was in Canada. In Canada the twenty-fourth of May WAS the
Queen’s Birthday; and these were times and regions far removed from the
prescription that the anniversary “should be observed” on any of those
various outlying dates which by now, must have produced in her immediate
people such indecision as to the date upon which Her Majesty really
did come into the world. That day, and that only, was the observed, the
celebrated, a day with an essence in it, dawning more gloriously than
other days and ending more regretfully, unless, indeed, it fell on a
Sunday when it was “kept” on the Monday, with a slightly clouded feeling
that it wasn’t exactly the same thing. Travelled persons, who had spent
the anniversary there, were apt to come back with a poor opinion of
its celebration in “the old country”--a pleasant relish to the
more-than-ever appreciated advantages of the new, the advantages
that came out so by contrast. More space such persons indicated, more
enterprise they boasted, and even more loyalty they would flourish,
all with an affectionate reminiscent smile at the little ways of a
grandmother. A “Bank” holiday, indeed! Here it was a real holiday, that
woke you with bells and cannon--who has forgotten the time the ancient
piece of ordnance in “the Square” blew out all the windows in the
Methodist church?--and went on with squibs and crackers till you didn’t
know where to step on the sidewalks, and ended up splendidly with
rockets and fire-balloons and drunken Indians vociferous on their way to
the lock-up. Such a day for the hotels, with teams hitched three abreast
in front of their aromatic barrooms; such a day for the circus, with
half the farmers of Fox County agape before the posters--with all their
chic and shock they cannot produce such posters nowadays, nor are there
any vacant lots to form attractive backgrounds--such a day for Mother
Beggarlegs! The hotels, and the shops and stalls for eating and
drinking, were the only places in which business was done; the public
sentiment put universal shutters up, but the public appetite insisted
upon excepting the means to carnival. An air of ceremonial festivity
those fastened shutters gave; the sunny little town sat round them,
important and significant, and nobody was ever known to forget that they
were up, and go on a fool’s errand. No doubt they had an impressiveness
for the young countryfolk that strolled up and down Main Street in their
honest best, turning into Snow’s for ice-cream when a youth was disposed
to treat. (Gallantry exacted ten-cent dishes, but for young ladies
alone, or family parties, Mrs Snow would bring five-cent quantities
almost without asking, and for very small boys one dish and the
requisite number of spoons.) There was discrimination, there was choice,
in this matter of treating. A happy excitement accompanied it, which you
could read in the way Corydon clapped his soft felt hat on his head as
he pocketed the change. To be treated--to ten-cent dishes--three times
in the course of the day by the same young man gave matter for private
reflection and for public entertainment, expressed in the broad grins of
less reckless people. I speak of a soft felt hat, but it might be more
than that: it might be a dark green one, with a feather in it; and here
was distinction, for such a hat indicated that its owner belonged to the
Independent Order of Foresters, who Would leave their spring wheat for
forty miles round to meet in Elgin and march in procession, wearing
their hats, and dazzlingly scatter upon Main Street. They gave the day
its touch of imagination, those green cocked hats; they were lyrical
upon the highways; along the prosaic sidewalks by twos and threes they
sang together. It is no great thing, a hat of any quality; but a small
thing may ring dramatic on the right metal, and in the vivid idea of
Lorne Murchison and his sister Advena a Robin Hood walked in every
Independent Forester, especially in the procession. Which shows the
risks you run if you, a person of honest livelihood and solicited vote,
adopt any portion of a habit not familiar to you, and go marching about
with a banner and a band. Two children may be standing at the first
street corner, to whom your respectability and your property may at once
become illusion and your outlawry the delightful fact.

A cheap trip brought the Order of Green Hats to Elgin; and there were
cheap trips on this great day to persuade other persons to leave it. The
Grand Trunk had even then an idea of encouraging social combination for
change of scene, and it was quite a common thing for the operatives of
the Milburn Boiler Company to arrange to get themselves carried to the
lakeside or “the Falls” at half a dollar a head. The “hands” got it up
themselves and it was a question in Elgin whether one might sink one’s
dignity and go as a hand for the sake of the fifty-cent opportunity,
a question usually decided in the negative. The social distinctions of
Elgin may not be easily appreciated by people accustomed to the rough
and ready standards of a world at the other end of the Grand Trunk; but
it will be clear at a glance that nobody whose occupation prescribed a
clean face could be expected to travel cheek by jowl, as a privilege,
with persons who were habitually seen with smutty ones, barefaced smut,
streaming out at the polite afternoon hour of six, jangling an empty
dinner pail. So much we may decide, and leave it, reflecting as we go
how simple and satisfactory, after all, are the prejudices which can
hold up such obvious justification. There was recently to be pointed
out in England the heir to a dukedom who loved stoking, and got his
face smutty by preference. He would have been deplorably subversive of
accepted conventions in Elgin; but, happily or otherwise, such persons
and such places have at present little more than an imaginative
acquaintance, vaguely cordial on the one side, vaguely critical on the
other, and of no importance in the sum.

Polite society, to return to it, preferred the alternative of staying
at home and mowing the lawn or drinking raspberry vinegar on its own
beflagged verandah; looking forward in the afternoon to the lacrosse
match. There was nearly always a lacrosse match on the Queen’s Birthday,
and it was the part of elegance to attend and encourage the home team,
as well as that of small boys, with broken straw hats, who sneaked an
entrance, and were more enthusiastic than anyone. It was “a quarter” to
get in, so the spectators were naturally composed of persons who could
afford the quarter, and persons like the young Flannigans and Finnigans,
who absolutely couldn’t, but who had to be there all the same. Lorne and
Advena Murchison never had the quarter, so they witnessed few lacrosse
matches, though they seldom failed to refresh themselves by a sight
of the players after the game when, crimson and perspiring, but still
glorious in striped jerseys, their lacrosses and running shoes slung
over one shoulder, these heroes left the field.

The Birthday I am thinking of, with Mrs Murchison as a central figure in
the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner, there was a lacrosse match of
some importance for the Fox County Championship and the Fox County Cup
as presented by the Member for the South Riding. Mrs Murchison remains
the central figure, nevertheless, with her family radiating from her,
gathered to help or to hinder in one of those domestic crises which
arose when the Murchisons were temporarily deprived of a “girl.”
 Everybody was subject to them in Elgin, everybody had to acknowledge and
face them. Let a new mill be opened, and it didn’t matter what you paid
her or how comfortable you made her, off she would go, and you might
think yourself lucky if she gave a week’s warning. Hard times shut down
the mills and brought her back again; but periods of prosperity were
very apt to find the ladies of Elgin where I am compelled to introduce
Mrs Murchison--in the kitchen. “You’d better get up--the girl’s gone,”
 Lorne had stuck his head into his sister’s room to announce, while
yet the bells were ringing and the rifles of the local volunteers were
spitting out the feu de joie. “I’ve lit the fire an’ swep’ out the
dining-room. You tell mother. Queen’s Birthday, too--I guess Lobelia’s
about as mean as they’re made!” And the Murchisons had descended to face
the situation. Lorne had by then done his part, and gone out into the
chromatic possibilities of the day; but the sense of injury he had
communicated to Advena in her bed remained and expanded. Lobelia, it was
felt, had scurvily manipulated the situation--her situation, it might
have been put, if any Murchison had been in the temper for jesting.
She had taken unjustifiable means to do a more unjustifiable thing,
to secure for herself an improper and unlawful share of the day’s
excitements, transferring her work, by the force of circumstances, to
the shoulders of other people since, as Mrs Murchison remarked, somebody
had to do it. Nor had she her mistress testified the excuse of fearing
unreasonable confinement. “I told her she might go when she had done her
dishes after dinner,” said Mrs Murchison, “and then she had only to come
back at six and get tea--what’s getting tea? I advised her to finish her
ironing yesterday, so as to be free of it today; and she said she would
be very glad to. Now, I wonder if she DID finish it!” and Mrs Murchison
put down her pan of potatoes with a thump to look in the family clothes
basket. “Not she! Five shirts and ALL the coloured things. I call it
downright deceit!”

“I believe I know the reason she’ll SAY,” said Advena. “She objects to
rag carpet in her bedroom. She told me so.”

“Rag carpet--upon my word!” Mrs Murchison dropped her knife to exclaim.
“It’s what her betters have to do with! I’ve known the day when that
very piece of rag carpet--sixty balls there were in it and every one I
sewed with my own fingers--was the best I had for my spare room, with
a bit of ingrain in the middle. Dear me!” she went on with a smile that
lightened the whole situation, “how proud I was of that performance! She
didn’t tell ME she objected to rag carpet!”

“No, Mother,” Advena agreed, “she knew better.”

They were all there in the kitchen, supporting their mother, and it
seems an opportunity to name them. Advena, the eldest, stood by the long
kitchen table washing the breakfast cups in “soft” soap and hot water.
The soft soap--Mrs Murchison had a barrelful boiled every spring in
the back yard, an old colonial economy she hated to resign--made a
fascinating brown lather with iridescent bubbles. Advena poured cupfuls
of it from on high to see the foam rise, till her mother told her for
mercy’s sake to get on with those dishes. She stood before a long low
window, looking out into the garden and the light, filtering through
apple branches on her face showed her strongly featured and intelligent
for fourteen. Advena was named after one grandmother; when the next
girl came Mrs Murchison, to make an end of the matter, named it Abigail,
after the other. She thought both names outlandish and acted under
protest, but hoped that now everybody would be satisfied. Lorne came
after Advena, at the period of a naive fashion of christening the young
sons of Canada in the name of her Governor-General. It was a simple
way of attesting a loyal spirit, but with Mrs Murchison more particular
motives operated. The Marquis of Lorne was not only the deputy of the
throne, he was the son-in-law of a good woman of whom Mrs Murchison
thought more, and often said it, for being the woman she was than for
being twenty times a Queen; and he had made a metrical translation of
the Psalms, several of which were included in the revised psalter for
the use of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, from which the whole
of Knox Church sang to the praise of God every Sunday. These were
circumstances that weighed with Mrs Murchison, and she called her son
after the Royal representative, feeling that she was doing well for him
in a sense beyond the mere bestowal of a distinguished and a euphonious
name, though that, as she would have willingly acknowledged, was “well
enough in its place.”

We must take this matter of names seriously; the Murchisons always did.
Indeed, from the arrival of a new baby until the important Sunday of
the christening, nothing was discussed with such eager zest and such
sustained interest as the name he should get--there was a fascinating
list at the back of the dictionary--and to the last minute it was
problematical. In Stella’s case, Mrs Murchison actually changed her mind
on the way to church; and Abby, who had sat through the sermon
expecting Dorothy Maud, which she thought lovely, publicly cried with
disappointment. Stella was the youngest, and Mrs Murchison was thankful
to have a girl at last whom she could name without regard to her own
relations or anybody else’s. I have skipped about a good deal, but I
have only left out two, the boys who came between Abby and Stella. In
their names the contemporary observer need not be too acute to discover
both an avowal and to some extent an enforcement of Mr Murchison’s
political views; neither an Alexander Mackenzie nor an Oliver Mowat
could very well grow up into anything but a sound Liberal in that part
of the world without feeling himself an unendurable paradox. To christen
a baby like that was, in a manner, a challenge to public attention; the
faint relaxation about the lips of Dr Drummond--the best of the
Liberals himself, though he made a great show of keeping it out of
the pulpit--recognized this, and the just perceptible stir of the
congregation proved it. Sonorously he said it. “Oliver Mowat, I baptize
thee in the Name of the Father--” The compliment should have all the
impressiveness the rite could give it, while the Murchison brothers and
sisters, a-row in the family pew, stood on one foot with excitement as
to how Oliver Mowat would take the drops that defined him. The verdict
was, on the way home, that he behaved splendidly. Alexander Mackenzie,
the year before, had roared.

He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously,
behind the woodpile. His father had finally cuffed him for importunity;
and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but
his rights. Only the woodpile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood
inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances;
and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till,
observing them, he began to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a
pond there, and was presently disappointed to find the source exhausted.
The Murchisons were all imaginative.

The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still “tormented.” Poor Alec’s
rights--to a present of pocket-money on the Queen’s Birthday--were
common ones, and almost statutory. How their father, sitting comfortably
with his pipe in the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin,
reading the Toronto paper, could evade his liability in the matter was
unfathomable to the Murchisons; it was certainly illiberal; they had a
feeling that it was illegal. A little teasing was generally necessary,
but the resistance today had begun to look ominous and Alec, as we know,
too temerarious, had retired in disorder to the woodpile.

Oliver was wiping Advena’s dishes. He exercised himself ostentatiously
upon a plate, standing in the door to be within earshot of his father.

“Eph Wheeler,” he informed his family, “Eph Wheeler, he’s got
twenty-five cents, an’ a English sixpence, an’ a Yankee nickel. An’ Mr
Wheeler’s only a common working man, a lot poorer’n we are.”

Mr Murchison removed his pipe from his lips in order, apparently, to
follow unimpeded the trend of the Dominion’s leading article. Oliver
eyed him anxiously. “Do, Father,” he continued in logical sequence. “Aw
do.”

“Make him, Mother,” said Abby indignantly. “It’s the Queen’s BIRTHDAY!”

“Time enough when the butter bill’s paid,” said Mrs Murchison.

“Oh the BUTTER bill! Say, Father, aren’t you going to?”

“What?” asked John Murchison, and again took out his pipe, as if this
were the first he had heard of the matter.

“Give us our fifteen cents each to celebrate with. You can’t do it under
that,” Oliver added firmly. “Crackers are eight cents a packet this
year, the small size.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr Murchison. The reply was definite and final, and its
ambiguity was merely due to the fact that their father disliked giving
a plump refusal. “Nonsense” was easier to say, if not to hear than “No.”
 Oliver considered for a moment, drew Abby to colloquy by the pump, and
sought his brother behind the woodpile. Then he returned to the charge.

“Look here, Father,” he said, “CASH DOWN, we’ll take ten.”

John Murchison was a man of few words, but they were usually impregnated
with meaning, especially in anger. “No more of this,” he said.
“Celebrate fiddlesticks! Go and make yourselves of some use. You’ll get
nothing from me, for I haven’t got it.” So saying, he went through the
kitchen with a step that forbade him to be followed. His eldest son,
arriving over the backyard fence in a state of heat, was just in time
to hear him. Lorne’s apprehension of the situation was instant, and his
face fell, but the depression plainly covered such splendid spirits that
his brother asked resentfully, “Well, what’s the matter with YOU?”

“Matter? Oh, not much. I’m going to see the Cayugas beat the Wanderers,
that’s all; an’ Abe Mackinnon’s mother said he could ask me to come back
to tea with them. Can I, Mother?”

“There’s no objection that I know of,” said Mrs Murchison, shaking her
apron free of stray potato-parings, “but you won’t get money for the
lacrosse match or anything else from your father today, _I_ can assure
you. They didn’t do five dollars worth of business at the store all day
yesterday, and he’s as cross as two sticks.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Lorne jingled his pocket and Oliver took
a fascinated step toward him. “I made thirty cents this morning,
delivering papers for Fisher. His boy’s sick. I did the North Ward--took
me over’n hour. Guess I can go all right, can’t I?”

“Why, yes, I suppose you can,” said his mother. The others were dumb.
Oliver hunched his shoulders and kicked at the nearest thing that had
paint on it. Abby clung to the pump handle and sobbed aloud. Lorne
looked gloomily about him and went out. Making once more for the back
fence, he encountered Alexander in the recognized family retreat. “Oh,
my goodness!” he said, and stopped. In a very few minutes he was back
in the kitchen, followed sheepishly by Alexander, whose grimy face
expressed the hope that beat behind his little waistcoat.

“Say, you kids,” he announced, “Alec’s got four cents, an’ he says he’ll
join up. This family’s going to celebrate all right. Come on down town.”

No one could say that the Murchisons were demonstrative. They said
nothing, but they got their hats. Mrs Murchison looked up from her
occupation.

“Alec,” she said, “out of this house you don’t go till you’ve washed
your face. Lorne, come here,” she added in a lower voice, producing a
bunch of keys. “If you look in the right-hand corner of the top small
drawer in my bureau you’ll find about twenty cents. Say nothing about
it, and mind you don’t meddle with anything else. I guess the Queen
isn’t going to owe it all to you.”




CHAPTER II

“We’ve seen changes, Mr Murchison. Aye. We’ve seen changes.”

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door, over
which the sign “John Murchison: Hardware,” had explained thirty years of
varying commercial fortune. They had pretty well begun life together in
Elgin. John Murchison was one of those who had listened to Mr Drummond’s
trial sermon, and had given his vote to “call” him to the charge. Since
then there had been few Sundays when, morning and evening, Mr Murchison
had not been in his place at the top of his pew, where his dignified
and intelligent head appeared with the isolated significance of a strong
individuality. People looked twice at John Murchison in a crowd; so did
his own children at home. Hearing some discussion of the selection of a
premier, Alec, looking earnestly at him once said, “Why don’t they tell
Father to be it?” The young minister looked twice at him that morning
of the trial sermon, and asked afterward who he was. A Scotchman, Mr
Drummond was told, not very long from the old country, who had bought
the Playfair business on Main Street, and settled in the “Plummer
Place,” which already had a quarter of a century’s standing in the
annals of the town. The Playfair business was a respectable business to
buy; the Plummer Place, though it stood in an unfashionable outskirt,
was a respectable place to settle in; and the minister, in casting his
lot in Elgin, envisaged John Murchison as part of it, thought of him
confidently as a “dependance,” saw him among the future elders and
office-bearers of the congregation, a man who would be punctual with his
pew-rent, sage in his judgements, and whose views upon church attendance
would be extended to his family.

So the two came, contemporaries, to add their labour and their lives
to the building of this little outpost of Empire. It was the frankest
transfer, without thought of return; they were there to spend and be
spent within the circumference of the spot they had chosen, with no
ambition beyond. In the course of nature, even their bones and their
memories would enter into the fabric. The new country filled their eyes;
the new town was their opportunity, its destiny their fate. They were
altogether occupied with its affairs, and the affairs of the growing
Dominion, yet obscure in the heart of each of them ran the undercurrent
of the old allegiance. They had gone the length of their tether, but the
tether was always there. Thus, before a congregation that always stood
in the early days, had the minister every Sunday morning for thirty
years besought the Almighty, with ardour and humility, on behalf of the
Royal Family. It came in the long prayer, about the middle. Not in the
perfunctory words of a ritual, but in the language of his choice, which
varied according to what he believed to be the spiritual needs of the
reigning House, and was at one period, touching certain of its members,
though respectful, extremely candid. The General Assembly of the Church
of Scotland, “now in session,” also--was it ever forgotten once? And
even the Prime Minister, “and those who sit in council with him,” with
just a hint of extra commendation if it happened to be Mr Gladstone. The
minister of Knox Church, Elgin, Ontario, Canada, kept his eye on them
all. Remote as he was, and concerned with affairs of which they could
know little, his sphere of duty could never revolve too far westward to
embrace them, nor could his influence, under any circumstances, cease
to be at their disposal. It was noted by some that after Mr Drummond had
got his D.D. from an American University he also prayed occasionally
for the President of the neighbouring republic; but this was rebutted
by others, who pointed out that it happened only on the occurrence of
assassinations, and held it reasonable enough. The cavillers mostly
belonged to the congregation of St Andrew’s, “Established”--a glum,
old-fashioned lot indeed--who now and then dropped in of a Sunday
evening to hear Mr Drummond preach. (There wasn’t much to be said for
the preaching at St Andrew’s.) The Established folk went on calling the
minister of Knox Church “Mr” Drummond long after he was “Doctor” to his
own congregation, on account of what they chose to consider the dubious
source of the dignity; but the Knox Church people had their own theory
to explain this hypercriticism, and would promptly turn the conversation
to the merits of the sermon.

Twenty-five years it was, in point, this Monday morning when the
Doctor--not being Established we need not hesitate, besides by this time
nobody did--stood with Mr Murchison in the store door and talked about
having seen changes. He had preached his anniversary sermon the night
before to a full church when, laying his hand upon his people’s
heart, he had himself to repress tears. He was aware of another
strand completed in their mutual bond: the sermon had been a moral,
an emotional, and an oratorical success; and in the expansion of the
following morning Dr Drummond had remembered that he had promised his
housekeeper a new gas cooking-range, and that it was high time he should
drop into Murchison’s to inquire about it. Mrs Forsyth had mentioned at
breakfast that they had ranges with exactly the improvement she wanted
at Thompson’s, but the minister was deaf to the hint. Thompson was a
Congregationalist and, improvement or no improvement, it wasn’t likely
that Dr Drummond was going “outside the congregation” for anything he
required. It would have been on a par with a wandering tendency in his
flock, upon which he systematically frowned. He was as great an autocrat
in this as the rector of any country parish in England undermined by
Dissent; but his sense of obligation worked unfailingly both ways.

John Murchison had not said much about the sermon; it wasn’t his way,
and Dr Drummond knew it. “You gave us a good sermon last night, Doctor”;
not much more than that, and “I noticed the Milburns there; we don’t
often get Episcopalians”; and again, “The Wilcoxes”--Thomas Wilcox,
wholesale grocer, was the chief prop of St Andrew’s--“were sitting just
in front of us. We overtook them going home, and Wilcox explained how
much they liked the music. ‘Glad to see you,’ I said. ‘Glad to see you
for any reason,’” Mr Murchison’s eye twinkled. “But they had a
great deal to say about ‘the music.’” It was not an effusive form of
felicitation; the minister would have liked it less if it had been,
felt less justified, perhaps, in remembering about the range on that
particular morning. As it was, he was able to take it with perfect
dignity and good humour, and to enjoy the point against the Wilcoxes
with that laugh of his that did everybody good to hear; so hearty it
was, so rich in the grain of the voice, so full of the zest and flavour
of the joke. The range had been selected, and their talk of changes had
begun with it, Mr Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler and
Dr Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that burned wood and
stood on its four legs, with nothing behind but the stove pipe, and if
you wanted a boiler you took off the front lids and put it on, and how
remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from the conservative
kitchen notions of the old country. He had come, unhappily, a widower
to the domestic improvements on the other side of the Atlantic. “Often
I used to think,” he said to Mr Murchison, “if my poor wife could have
seen that stove how delighted she would have been! But I doubt this
would have been too much for her altogether!”

“That stove!” answered Mr Murchison. “Well I remember it. I sold it
myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart, for thirty dollars--the last
purchase he ever made, poor man. It was great business for me--I
had only two others in the store like it. One of them old Milburn
bought--the father of this man, d’ye mind him?--the other stayed by me a
matter of seven years. I carried a light stock in those days.”

It was no longer a light stock. The two men involuntarily glanced round
them for the satisfaction of the contrast Murchison evoked, though
neither of them, from motives of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell
upon it. John Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial
success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation toward
the prosperity of a member had in some degree the embarrassment of a
tax-gatherer’s. The stock was indeed heavy now. You had to go upstairs
to see the ranges, where they stood in rows, and every one of them
bore somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison’s name.
Through the windows came the iterating ring on the iron from the foundry
in Chestnut Street which fed the shop, with an overflow that found its
way from one end of the country to the other. Finicking visitors to
Elgin found this wearing, but to John Murchison it was the music that
honours the conqueror of circumstances. The ground floor was given up
to the small wares of the business, chiefly imported; two or three
young men, steady and knowledgeable-looking, moved about in their shirt
sleeves among shelves and packing-cases. One of them was our friend
Alec; our other friend Oliver looked after the books at the foundry.
Their father did everything deliberately; but presently, in his own good
time, his commercial letter paper would be headed, with regard to these
two, “John Murchison and Sons.” It had long announced that the business
was “Wholesale and Retail.”

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison, considering the changes in Elgin from the
store door, did it at their leisure, the merchant with his thumbs thrust
comfortably in the armholes of his waistcoat, the minister, with that
familiar trick of his, balancing on one foot and suddenly throwing his
slight weight forward on the other. “A bundle of nerves,” people called
the Doctor: to stand still would have been a penance to him; even as
he swayed backward and forward in talking, his hand must be busy at the
seals on his watch chain and his shrewd glance travelling over a dozen
things you would never dream so clever a man would take notice of. It
was a prospect of moderate commercial activity they looked out upon,
a street of mellow shopfronts on both sides, of varying height and
importance, wearing that air of marking a period, a definite stop
in growth, that so often coexists with quite a reasonable degree of
activity and independence in colonial towns. One could almost say,
standing there in the door at Murchison’s, where the line of legitimate
enterprise had been overpassed and where its intention had been none
too sanguine--on the one hand in the faded, and pretentious red brick
building with the false third storey, occupied by Cleary which must have
been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything else; on the other hand
in the solid “Gregory block,” opposite the market, where rents were as
certain as the dividends of the Bank of British North America.

Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of growing and
doing business, it had always found the days long enough. Drays passed
through it to the Grand Trunk station, but they passed one at a time; a
certain number of people went up and down about their affairs, but they
were never in a hurry; a street car jogged by every ten minutes or so,
but nobody ran after it. There was a decent procedure; and it was felt
that Bofield--he was dry-goods, too--in putting in an elevator was just
a little unnecessarily in advance of the times. Bofield had only two
storeys, like everybody else, and a very easy staircase, up which people
often declared they preferred to walk rather than wait in the elevator
for a young man to finish serving and work it. These, of course, were
the sophisticated people of Elgin; countryfolk, on a market day, would
wait a quarter of an hour for the young man and think nothing of it;
and I imagine Bofield found his account in the elevator, though he
did complain sometimes that such persons went up and down on frivolous
pretexts or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun
as the centre of “trading” for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon
over-supplied that limit in demand; so that when other interests added
themselves to the activity of the town there was still plenty of room
for the business they brought. Main Street was really, therefore, not a
fair index; nobody in Elgin would have admitted it. Its appearance and
demeanour would never have suggested that it was now the chief artery
of a thriving manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute, eleven
churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for the deaf and dumb, to
say nothing of a fire department unsurpassed for organization and
achievement in the Province of Ontario. Only at twelve noon it might be
partly realized when the prolonged “toots” of seven factory whistles at
once let off, so to speak, the hour. Elgin liked the demonstration; it
was held to be cheerful and unmistakable, an indication of “go-ahead”
 proclivities which spoke for itself. It occurred while yet Dr Drummond
and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door.

“I must be getting on,” said the minister, looking at his watch. “And
what news have you of Lorne?”

“Well, he seems to have got through all right.”

“What--you’ve heard already, then?”

“He telegraphed from Toronto on Saturday night.” Mr Murchison stroked
his chin, the better to retain his satisfaction. “Waste of money--the
post would have brought it this morning--but it pleased his mother. Yes,
he’s through his Law Schools examination, and at the top, too, as far as
I can make out.”

“Dear me, and you never mentioned it!” Dr Drummond spoke with the
resigned impatience of a familiar grievance. It was certainly a trying
characteristic of John Murchison that he never cared about communicating
anything that might seem to ask for congratulation. “Well, well! I’m
very glad to hear it.”

“It slipped my mind,” said Mr Murchison. “Yes, he’s full-fledged
‘barrister and solicitor’ now; he can plead your case or draw you up a
deed with the best of them. Lorne’s made a fair record, so far. We’ve no
reason to be ashamed of him.”

“That you have not.” Personal sentiments between these two Scotchmen
were indicated rather than indulged. “He’s going in with Fulke and
Warner, I suppose--you’ve got that fixed up?”

“Pretty well. Old man Warner was in this morning to talk it over. He
says they look to Lorne to bring them in touch with the new generation.
It’s a pity he lost that son of his.”

“Oh, a great pity. But since they had to go outside the firm they
couldn’t have done better; they couldn’t have done better. I hope Lorne
will bring them a bit of Knox Church business too; there’s no reason why
Bob Mackintosh should have it all. They’ll be glad to see him back at
the Hampden Debating Society. He’s a great light there, is Lorne; and
the Young Liberals, I hear are wanting him for chairman this year.”

“There’s some talk of it. But time enough--time enough for that! He’ll
do first-rate if he gets the law to practise, let alone the making of
it.”

“Maybe so; he’s young yet. Well, good morning to you. I’ll just step
over the way to the Express office and get a proof out of them of
that sermon of mine. I noticed their reporter fellow--what’s his
name?--Rawlins, with his pencil out last night, and I’ve no faith in
Rawlins.”

“Better cast an eye over it,” responded Mr Murchison cordially, and
stood for a moment or two longer in the door watching the crisp,
significant little figure of the minister as he stepped briskly over the
crossing to the newspaper office. There Dr Drummond sat down, before he
explained his errand, and wrote a paragraph.

“We are pleased to learn,” it ran “that Mr Lorne Murchison, eldest son
of Mr John Murchison, of this town, has passed at the capital of the
Province his final examination in Law, distinguishing himself by coming
out at the top of the list. It will be remembered that Mr Murchison,
upon entering the Law Schools, also carried off a valuable scholarship.
We are glad to be able to announce that Mr Murchison, Junior, will
embark upon his profession in his native town, where he will enter the
well-known firm of Fulke and Warner.”

The editor, Mr Horace Williams, had gone to dinner, and Rawlins was out
so Dr Drummond had to leave it with the press foreman. Mr Williams read
it appreciatively on his return, and sent it down with the following
addition:

“This is doing it as well as it can be done. Elgin congratulates Mr L.
Murchison upon having produced these results, and herself upon having
produced Mr L. Murchison.”




CHAPTER III

From the day she stepped into it Mrs Murchison knew that the Plummer
Place was going to be the bane of her existence. This may have been
partly because Mr Murchison had bought it, since a circumstance welded
like that into one’s life is very apt to assume the character of a bane,
unless one’s temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs Murchison’s
didn’t. But there were other reasons more difficult to traverse: it was
plainly true that the place did require a tremendous amount of “looking
after,” as such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking after
than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They could never have
afforded, in the beginning, to possess it had it not been sold, under
mortgage, at a dramatic sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair,
built of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs compassing
the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had
only to turn his hand to the forest. It stood on the very edge of
the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and
corn-stacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army. The
plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road or, if you
were so inclined, the river, into which you could throw a stone from
the orchard of the Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in
ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each
side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected
by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that
a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the
middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton,
most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed
air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was
also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a
lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often said,
must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money
to live up to them. The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn,
till a succession of “girls” left on account of the milking, and the
lane was useful as an approach to the backyard by the teams that brought
the cordwood in the winter. It was trying enough for a person with
the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door
circumstances which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison often
declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there.
It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison
in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier,
and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece. She had an icehouse
and a wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected
with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not
one of them was in order. She had far too much, as she declared, for
any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not
dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library
or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted
reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not to put his foot through
it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just
have to drop. The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible
amelioration--it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs
Murchison often wished she could afford to pull it down.

It may be realized that in spite of its air of being impossible
to “overtake”--I must, in this connection, continue to quote its
mistress--there was an attractiveness about the dwelling of the
Murchisons the attractiveness of the large ideas upon which it had
been built and designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced
income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous view to economy
and occupation, to perish of the readjustment. The case of such persons,
when they arrive, is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local
understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be entitled
to respect, but nothing can save them from the isolation of their
difference and their misapprehension. It was like that with the house.
The house was admired--without enthusiasm--but it was not copied. It
was felt to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it
wore its superiority in the popular view like a folly. It was in Elgin,
but not of it: it represented a different tradition; and Elgin made the
same allowance for its bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities
as was conceded to its original master’s habit of a six-o’clock dinner,
with wine.

The architectural expression of the town was on a different scale,
beginning with “frame,” rising through the semidetached, culminating
expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas and modern conveniences, and
blossoming, in extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk
portieres for interior decoration. The Murchison house gained by force
of contrast: one felt, stepping into it, under influences of less
expediency and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention;
its shabby spaces had a redundancy the pleasanter and its yellow plaster
cornices a charm the greater for the numerous close-set examples of
contemporary taste in red brick which made, surrounded by geranium beds,
so creditable an appearance in the West Ward. John Murchison in taking
possession of the house had felt in it these satisfactions, had been
definitely penetrated and soothed by them, the more perhaps because he
brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier things of life which
circumstances had not previously developed. He seized the place with a
sense of opportunity leaping sharp and conscious out of early years
in the grey “wynds” of a northern Scottish town; and its personality
sustained him, very privately but none the less effectively, through
the worry and expense of it for years. He would take his pipe and walk
silently for long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening,
for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts in flower; and
he never opened the hall door without a feeling of gratification in
its weight as it swung under his hand. In so far as he could, he
supplemented the idiosyncrasies he found. The drawing-room walls, though
mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper--lavender and gilt, a
grape-vine pattern--held a few good engravings; the library was reduced
to contain a single bookcase, but it was filled with English classics.
John Murchison had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the
discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books. He bought them
between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the
expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under
his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose
itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe. Mrs Murchison
kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband
brought home Chambers’s Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly
and definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new
winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all endurance. Mrs
Murchison was surrounded, indeed, by more of “that sort of thing”
 than she could find use or excuse for; since, though books made but a
sporadic appearance, current literature, daily, weekly, and monthly,
was perpetually under her feet. The Toronto paper came as a matter of
course, as the London daily takes its morning flight into the provinces,
the local organ as simply indispensable, the Westminster as the
corollary of church membership and for Sunday reading. These were
constant, but there were also mutables--Once a Week, Good Words for
the Young, Blackwood’s, and the Cornhill they used to be; years of back
numbers Mrs Murchison had packed away in the attic, where Advena
on rainy days came into the inheritance of them, and made an early
acquaintance with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner’s Pride,
while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious hours on The
Back of the North Wind. Their father considered such publications and
their successors essential, like tobacco and tea. He was also an easy
prey to the subscription agent, for works published in parts and
paid for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded with
abhorrence. So much so that when John put his name down for Masterpieces
of the World’s Art, which was to cost twenty dollars by the time it was
complete, he thought it advisable to let the numbers accumulate at the
store.

Whatever the place represented to their parents, it was pure joy to the
young Murchisons. It offered a margin and a mystery to life. They saw
it far larger than it was; they invested it, arguing purely by its
difference from other habitations, with a romantic past. “I guess
when the Prince of Wales came to Elgin, Mother, he stayed here,” Lorne
remarked, as a little boy. Secretly he and Advena took up boards in more
than one unused room, and rapped on more than one thick wall to find a
hollow chamber; the house revealed so much that was interesting, it was
apparent to the meanest understanding that it must hide even more.
It was never half lighted, and there was a passage in which fear
dwelt--wild were the gallopades from attic to cellar in the early
nightfall, when every young Murchison tore after every other, possessed,
like cats, by a demoniac ecstasy of the gloaming. And the garden, with
the autumn moon coming over the apple trees and the neglected asparagus
thick for ambush, and a casual untrimmed boy or two with the delicious
recommendation of being utterly without credentials, to join in the rout
and be trusted to make for the back fence without further hint at the
voice of Mrs Murchison--these were joys of the very fibre, things to
push ideas and envisage life with an attraction that made it worth while
to grow up.

And they had all achieved it--all six. They had grown up sturdily,
emerging into sobriety and decorum by much the same degrees as the old
house, under John Murchison’s improving fortunes, grew cared for and
presentable. The new roof went on, slate replacing shingles, the year
Abby put her hair up; the bathroom was contemporary with Oliver’s
leaving school; the electric light was actually turned on for the
first time in honour of Lorne’s return from Toronto, a barrister and
solicitor; several rooms had been done up for Abby’s wedding. Abby had
married, early and satisfactorily, Dr Harry Johnson, who had placidly
settled down to await the gradual succession of his father’s practice;
“Dr Harry and Dr Henry” they were called. Dr Harry lived next door to
Dr Henry, and had a good deal of the old man’s popular manner. It was
an unacknowledged partnership, which often provided two opinions for the
same price; the town prophesied well of it. That left only five at
home, but they always had Abby over in the West Ward, where Abby’s
housekeeping made an interest and Abby’s baby a point of pilgrimage.
These considerations almost consoled Mrs Murchison declaring, as she
did, that all of them might have gone but Abby, who alone knew how to be
“any comfort or any dependence” in the house; who could be left with a
day’s preserving; and I tell you that to be left by Mrs Murchison with a
day’s preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons or pears, was
a mark of confidence not easy to obtain. Advena never had it; Advena,
indeed, might have married and removed no prop of the family economy.
Mrs Murchison would have been “sorry for the man”--she maintained
a candour toward and about those belonging to her that permitted no
illusions--but she would have stood cheerfully out of the way on her
own account. When you have seen your daughter reach and pass the age
of twenty-five without having learned properly to make her own bed, you
know without being told that she will never be fit for the management of
a house--don’t you? Very well then. And for ever and for ever, no matter
what there was to do, with a book in her hand--Mrs Murchison would put
an emphasis on the “book” which scarcely concealed a contempt for such
absorption. And if, at the end of your patience, you told her for any
sake to put it down and attend to matters, obeying in a kind of dream
that generally drove you to take the thing out of her hands and do it
yourself, rather than jump out of your skin watching her.

Sincerely Mrs Murchison would have been sorry for the man if he had
arrived, but he had not arrived. Advena justified her existence by
taking the university course for women at Toronto, and afterward
teaching the English branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate
Institute, which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic
criticism. Mrs Murchison was thankful to have her there--outside--where
little more could reasonably be expected of her than that she should
be down in time for breakfast. It is so irritating to be justified
in expecting more than seems likely to come. Mrs Murchison’s ideas
circulated strictly in the orbit of equity and reason; she expected
nothing from anybody that she did not expect from herself; indeed, she
would spare others in far larger proportion. But the sense of obligation
which led her to offer herself up to the last volt of her energy made
her miserable when she considered that she was not fairly done by in
return. Pressed down and running over were the services she offered to
the general good, and it was on the ground of the merest justice that
she required from her daughters “some sort of interest” in domestic
affairs. From her eldest she got no sort of interest, and it was
like the removal of a grievance from the hearth when Advena took up
employment which ranged her definitely beyond the necessity of being
of any earthly use in the house. Advena’s occupation to some extent
absorbed her shortcomings, which was much better than having to
attribute them to her being naturally “through-other,” or naturally
clever, according to the bias of the moment. Mrs Murchison no longer
excused or complained of her daughter; but she still pitied the man.

“The boys,” of course, were too young to think of matrimony. They were
still the boys, the Murchison boys; they would be the boys at forty if
they remained under their father’s roof. In the mother country, men in
short jackets and round collars emerge from the preparatory schools; in
the daughter lands boys in tailcoats conduct serious affairs. Alec
and Oliver, in the business, were frivolous enough as to the feminine
interest. For all Dr Drummond’s expressed and widely known views upon
the subject, it was a common thing for one or both of these young men
to stray from the family pew on Sunday evenings to the services of other
communions, thereafter to walk home in the dusk under the maples with
some attractive young person, and be sedately invited to finish the
evening on her father’s verandah. Neither of them was guiltless of silk
ties knitted or handkerchiefs initialled by certain fingers; without
repeating scandal, one might say by various fingers. For while the
ultimate import of these matters was not denied in Elgin, there was
a general feeling against giving too much meaning to them, probably
originating in a reluctance among heads of families to add to their
responsibilities. These early spring indications were belittled and
laughed at; so much so that the young people them selves hardly
took them seriously, but regarded them as a form of amusement almost
conventional. Nothing would have surprised or embarrassed them more
than to learn that their predilections had an imperative corollary,
that anything should, of necessity, “come of it.” Something, of course,
occasionally did come of it; and, usually after years of “attention,” a
young man of Elgin found himself mated to a young woman, but never under
circumstances that could be called precipitate or rash. The cautious
blood and far sight of the early settlers, who had much to reckon with,
were still preponderant social characteristics of the town they cleared
the site for. Meanwhile, however, flowers were gathered, and all sorts
of evanescent idylls came and went in the relations of young men and
maidens. Alec and Oliver Murchison were already in the full tide of
them.

From this point of view they did not know what to make of Lorne. It was
not as if their brother were in any way ill calculated to attract that
interest which gave to youthful existence in Elgin almost the only
flavour that it had. Looks are looks, and Lorne had plenty of them;
taller by an inch than Alec, broader by two than Oliver, with a fine
square head and blue eyes in it, and features which conveyed purpose and
humour, lighted by a certain simplicity of soul that pleased even when
it was not understood. “Open,” people said he was, and “frank”--so he
was, frank and open, with horizons and intentions; you could see them in
his face. Perhaps it was more conscious of them than he was. Ambition,
definitely shining goals, adorn the perspectives of young men in new
countries less often than is commonly supposed. Lorne meant to be a good
lawyer, squarely proposed to himself that the country should hold no
better; and as to more selective usefulness, he hoped to do a little
stumping for the right side when Frank Jennings ran for the Ontario
House in the fall. It wouldn’t be his first electioneering: from the day
he became chairman of the Young Liberals the party had an eye on him,
and when occasion arose, winter or summer, by bobsleigh or buggy,
weatherbeaten local bosses would convey him to country schoolhouses for
miles about to keep a district sound on railway policy, or education,
or tariff reform. He came home smiling with the triumphs of these
occasions, and offered them, with the slow, good-humoured, capable drawl
that inspired such confidence in him, to his family at breakfast, who
said “Great!” or “Good for you, Lorne!” John Murchison oftenest said
nothing, but would glance significantly at his wife, frowning and
pursing his lips when she, who had most spirit of them all, would
exclaim, “You’ll be Premier yet, Lorne!” It was no part of the Murchison
policy to draw against future balances: they might believe everything,
they would express nothing; and I doubt whether Lorne himself had any
map of the country he meant to travel over in that vague future, already
defining in local approbation, and law business coming freely in with
a special eye on the junior partner. But the tract was there,
subconscious, plain in the wider glance, the alerter manner; plain even
in the grasp and stride which marked him in a crowd; plain, too, in the
preoccupation with other issues, were it only turning over a leader
in the morning’s Dominion, that carried him along indifferent to the
allurements I have described. The family had a bond of union in their
respect for Lorne, and this absence of nugatory inclinations in him
was among its elements. Even Stella who, being just fourteen, was the
natural mouthpiece of family sentiment, would declare that Lorne had
something better to do than go hanging about after girls, and for her
part she thought all the more of him for it.




CHAPTER IV

“I am requested to announce,” said Dr Drummond after the singing of the
last hymn, “the death, yesterday morning, of James Archibald Ramsay,
for fifteen years an adherent and for twenty-five years a member of this
church. The funeral will take place from the residence of the deceased,
on Court House Street, tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock. Friends and
acquaintances are respectfully--invited--to attend.”

The minister’s voice changed with the character of its affairs. Still
vibrating with the delivery of his sermon, it was now charged with the
official business of the interment. In its inflections it expressed both
elegy and eulogy; and in the brief pause before and after “invited” and
the fall of “attend” there was the last word of comment upon the mortal
term. A crispation of interest passed over the congregation; every chin
was raised. Dr Drummond’s voice had a wonderful claiming power, but he
often said he wished his congregation would pay as undivided attention
to the sermon as they did to the announcements.

“The usual weekly prayer meeting will be held in the basement of the
church on Wednesday evening.” Then almost in a tone of colloquy, and
with just a hint of satire about his long upper lip--

“I should be glad to see a better attendance of the young people at
these gatherings. Time was when the prayer meeting counted among our
young men and women as an occasion not to be lightly passed over. In
these days it would seem that there is too much business to be done, or
too much pleasure to be enjoyed, for the oncoming generation to remember
their weekly engagement with the Lord. This is not as it should be; and
I rely upon the fathers and mothers of this congregation, who brought
these children in their arms to the baptismal font, there to be admitted
to the good hopes and great privileges of the Church of God--I rely upon
them to see that there shall be no departure from the good old rule, and
that time is found for the weekly prayer meeting.”

Mrs Murchison nudged Stella, who returned the attention, looking
elaborately uninterested, with her foot. Alec and Oliver smiled
consciously; their father, with an expression of severe gravity, backed
up the minister who, after an instant’s pause, continued--

“On Tuesday afternoon next, God willing, I shall visit the following
families in the East Ward--Mr Peterson, Mr Macormack, Mrs Samuel Smith,
and Mr John Flint. On Thursday afternoon in the South Ward, Mrs Reid,
Mr P. C. Cameron, and Mr Murchison. We will close by singing the Third
Doxology: Blessed, blessed be Jehovah, Israel’s God to all eternity--”

The congregation trooped out; the Murchisons walked home in a clan, Mr
and Mrs Murchison, with Stella skirting the edge of the sidewalk beside
them, the two young men behind. Abby, when she married Harry, had “gone
over” to the Church of England. The wife must worship with the husband;
even Dr Drummond recognized the necessity, though he professed small
opinion of the sway of the spouse who, with Presbyterian traditions
behind her, could not achieve union the other way about; and Abby’s
sanctioned defection was a matter of rather shame-faced reference by her
family. Advena and Lorne had fallen into the degenerate modern habit of
preferring the evening service.

“So we’re to have the Doctor on Thursday,” said Mrs Murchison, plainly
not displeased. “Well, I hope the dining-room carpet will be down.”

“I expect he’ll be wanting his tea,” replied Mr Murchison. “He’s got you
in the right place on the list for that, Mother--as usual.”

“I’d just like to see him go anywhere else for his tea the day he was
coming to our house,” declared Stella. “But he GENERALLY has too much
sense.”

“You boys,” said Mrs Murchison, turning back to her sons, “will see that
you’re on hand that evening. And I hope the Doctor will rub it in about
the prayer meeting.” Mrs Murchison chuckled. “I saw it went home to both
of you, and well it might. Yes, I think I may as well expect him to tea.
He enjoys my scalloped oysters, if I do say it myself.”

“We’ll get Abby over,” said Mr Murchison. “That’ll please the Doctor.”

“I must say,” remarked Stella, “he seems to think a lot more of Abby now
that she’s Mrs Episcopal Johnson.”

“Yes, Abby and Harry must come,” said Mrs Murchison, “and I was thinking
of inviting Mr and Mrs Horace Williams. We’ve been there till I’m
ashamed to look them in the face. And I’ve pretty well decided,” she
added autocratically, “to have chicken salad. So if Dr Drummond has made
up his mouth for scalloped oysters he’ll be disappointed.”

“Mother,” announced Stella, “I’m perfectly certain you’ll have both.”

“I’ll consider it,” replied her mother. “Meanwhile we would be better
employed in thinking of what we have been hearing. That’s the third
sermon from the Book of Job in six weeks. I must say, with the whole of
the two Testaments to select from, I don’t see why the Doctor should be
so taken up with Job.”

Stella was vindicated; Mrs Murchison did have both. The chicken salad
gleamed at one end of the table and the scalloped oysters smoked
delicious at the other. Lorne had charge of the cold tongue and Advena
was entrusted with the pickled pears. The rest of the family were
expected to think about the tea biscuits and the cake, for Lobelia had
never yet had a successor that was any hand with company. Mrs Murchison
had enough to do to pour out the tea. It was a table to do anybody
credit, with its glossy damask and the old-fashioned silver and
best china that Mrs Murchison had brought as a bride to her
housekeeping--for, thank goodness, her mother had known what was what
in such matters--a generous attractive table that you took some
satisfaction in looking at. Mrs Murchison came of a family of noted
housekeepers; where she got her charm I don’t know. Six-o’clock tea, and
that the last meal in the day, was the rule in Elgin, and a good enough
rule for Mrs Murchison, who had no patience with the innovation of a
late dinner recently adopted by some people who could keep neither
their servants nor their digestions in consequence. It had been a crisp
October day; as Mr Murchison remarked, the fall evenings were beginning
to draw in early; everybody was glad of the fire in the grate and the
closed curtains. Dr Drummond had come about five, and the inquiries and
comments upon family matters that the occasion made incumbent had been
briskly exchanged, with just the word that marked the pastoral visit
and the practical interest that relieved it. And he had thought, on the
whole, that he might manage to stay to tea, at which Mrs Murchison’s
eyes twinkled as she said affectionately--

“Now, Doctor, you know we could never let you off.”

Then Abby had arrived and her husband, and finally Mr and Mrs Williams,
just a trifle late for etiquette, but well knowing that it mustn’t be
enough to spoil the biscuits. Dr Drummond in the place of honour,
had asked the blessing, and that brief reminder of the semiofficial
character of the occasion having been delivered, was in the best of
humours. The Murchisons were not far wrong in the happy divination
that he liked coming to their house. Its atmosphere appealed to him; he
expanded in its humour, its irregularity, its sense of temperament. They
were doubtful allurements, from the point of view of a minister of the
Gospel, but it would not occur to Dr Drummond to analyse them. So far
as he was aware, John Murchison was just a decent, prosperous, Christian
man, on whose word and will you might depend, and Mrs Murchison a
stirring, independent little woman, who could be very good company when
she felt inclined. As to their sons and daughters, in so far as they
were a credit, he was as proud of them as their parents could possibly
be, regarding himself as in a much higher degree responsible for the
formation of their characters and the promise of their talents. And
indeed, since every one of them had “sat under” Dr Drummond from the
day he or she was capable of sitting under anybody, Mr and Mrs Murchison
would have been the last to dispute this. It was not one of those houses
where a pastor could always be sure of leaving some spiritual benefit
behind; but then he came away himself with a pleasant sense of nervous
stimulus which was apt to take his mind off the matter. It is not given
to all of us to receive or to extend the communion of the saints; Mr
and Mrs Murchison were indubitably of the elect, but he was singularly
close-mouthed about it, and she had an extraordinary way of seeing the
humorous side--altogether it was paralysing, and the conversation would
wonderfully soon slip round to some robust secular subject, public or
domestic. I have mentioned Dr Drummond’s long upper lip; all sorts
of racial virtues resided there, but his mouth was also wide and much
frequented by a critical, humorous, philosophical smile which revealed
a view of life at once kindly and trenchant. His shrewd grey eyes were
encased in wrinkles, and when he laughed his hearty laugh they almost
disappeared in a merry line. He had a fund of Scotch stories, and one
or two he was very fond of, at the expense of the Methodists, that were
known up and down the Dominion, and nobody enjoyed them more than he
did himself. He had once worn his hair in a high curl on his scholarly
forehead, and a silvering tuft remained brushed upright; he took the
old-fashioned precaution of putting cotton wool in his ears, which
gave him more than ever the look of something highly concentrated and
conserved but in no way detracted from his dignity. St Andrew’s folk
accused him of vanity because of the diamond he wore on his little
finger. He was by no means handsome, but he was intensely individual;
perhaps he had vanity; his people would have forgiven him worse things.
And at Mrs Murchison’s tea party he was certainly, as John Murchison
afterward said, “in fine feather.”

An absorbing topic held them, a local topic, a topic involving loss and
crime and reprisals. The Federal Bank had sustained a robbery of five
thousand dollars, and in the course of a few days had placed their
cashier under arrest for suspected complicity. Their cashier was Walter
Ormiston, the only son of old Squire Ormiston, of Moneida Reservation,
ten miles out of Elgin, who had administered the affairs of the Indians
there for more years than the Federal Bank had existed. Mr Williams
brought the latest news, as was to be expected; news flowed in rivulets
to Mr Williams all day long; he paid for it, dealt in it, could spread
or suppress it.

“They’ve admitted the bail,” Mr Williams announced, with an air of
self-surveillance. Rawlins had brought the intelligence in too late for
the current issue, and Mr Williams was divided between his human desire
to communicate and his journalistic sense that the item would be the
main feature of the next afternoon’s Express.

“I’m glad of that. I’m glad of that,” repeated Dr Drummond. “Thank you,
Mrs Murchison, I’ll send my cup. And did you learn, Williams, for what
amount?”

Mr Williams ran his hand through his hair in the effort to remember, and
decided that he might as well let it all go. The Mercury couldn’t fail
to get it by tomorrow anyhow.

“Three thousand,” he said. “Milburn and Dr Henry Johnson.”

“I thought Father was bound to be in it,” remarked Dr Harry.

“Half and half?” asked John Murchison.

“No,” contributed Mrs Williams. “Mr Milburn two and Dr Henry one. Mr
Milburn is Walter’s uncle, you know.”

Mr Williams fastened an outraged glance on his wife, who looked another
way. Whatever he thought proper to do, it was absolutely understood that
she was to reveal nothing of what “came in,” and was even carefully to
conserve anything she heard outside with a view to bringing it in. Mrs
Williams was too prone to indiscretion in the matter of letting news
slip prematurely; and as to its capture, her husband would often
confess, with private humour, that Minnie wasn’t much of a mouser.

“Well, that’s something to be thankful for,” said Mrs Murchison. “I lay
awake for two hours last night thinking of that boy in jail, and his
poor old father, seventy-nine years of age, and such a fine old man, so
thoroughly respected.”

“I don’t know the young fellow,” said Dr Drummond, “but they say he’s
of good character, not over-solid, but bears a clean reputation. They’re
all Tories together, of course, the Ormistons.”

“It’s an old U. E. Loyalist family,” remarked Advena. “Mr Ormiston has
one or two rather interesting Revolutionary trophies at his house out
there.”

“None the worse for that. None the worse for that,” said Dr Drummond.

“Old Ormiston’s father,” contributed the editor of the Express, “had a
Crown grant of the whole of Moneida Reservation at one time. Government
actually bought it back from him to settle the Indians there. He was a
well-known Family Compact man, and fought tooth and nail for the Clergy
Reserves in ‘fifty.”

“Well, well,” said Dr Drummond, with a twinkle. “We’ll hope young
Ormiston is innocent, nevertheless.”

“Nasty business for the Federal Bank if he is,” Mr Williams went on.
“They’re a pretty unpopular bunch as it is.”

“Of course he’s innocent,” contributed Stella, with indignant eyes; “and
when they prove it, what can he do to the bank for taking him up? That’s
what I want to know.”

Her elders smiled indulgently. “A lot you know about it, kiddie,” said
Oliver. It was the only remark he made during the meal. Alec passed
the butter assiduously, but said nothing at all. Adolescence was
inarticulate in Elgin on occasions of ceremony.

“I hear they’ve piled up some big evidence,” said Mr Williams. “Young
Ormiston’s been fool enough to do some race-betting lately. Minnie,
I wish you’d get Mrs Murchison to show you how to pickle pears. Of
course,” he added, “they’re keeping it up their sleeve.”

“It’s a hard place to keep evidence,” said Lorne Murchison at last with
a smile which seemed to throw light on the matter. They had all been
waiting, more or less consciously, for what Lorne would have to say.

“Lorne, you’ve got it!” divined his mother instantly.

“Got what, Mother?”

“The case! I’ve suspected it from the minute the subject was mentioned!
That case came in today!”

“And you sitting there like a bump on a log, and never telling us!”
 exclaimed Stella, with reproach.

“Stella, you have a great deal too much to say,” replied her brother.
“Suppose you try sitting like a bump on a log. We won’t complain. Yes,
the Squire seems to have made up his mind about the defence, and my
seniors haven’t done much else today.”

“Rawlins saw him hitched up in front of your place for about two hours
this morning,” said Mr Williams. “I told him I thought that was good
enough, but we didn’t say anything, Rawlins having heard it was to be
Flynn from Toronto. And I hadn’t forgotten the Grand Trunk case we put
down to you last week without exactly askin’. Your old man was as mad as
a hornet--wanted to stop his subscription; Rawlins had no end of a time
to get round him. Little things like that will creep in when you’ve got
to trust to one man to run the whole local show. But I didn’t want the
Mercury to have another horse on us.”

“Do you think you’ll get a look in, Lorne?” asked Dr Harry.

“Oh, not a chance of it. The old man’s as keen as a razor on the case,
and you’d think Warner never had one before! If I get a bit of grubbing
to do, under supervision, they’ll consider I ought to be pleased.” It
was the sunniest possible tone of grumbling; it enlisted your sympathy
by its very acknowledgement that it had not a leg to stand on.

“They’re pretty wild about it out Moneida way,” said Dr Harry. “My
father says the township would put down the bail three times over.”

“They swear by the Squire out there,” said Mr Horace Williams, liberally
applying his napkin to his moustache. “He treated some of them more than
square when the fall wheat failed three years running, about ten years
back; do you remember, Mr Murchison? Lent them money at about half the
bank rate, and wasn’t in an awful sweat about getting it in at that
either.”

“And wasn’t there something about his rebuilding the school-house at his
own expense not so long ago?” asked Dr Drummond.

“Just what he did. I wanted to send Rawlins out and make a story of
it--we’d have given it a column, with full heads; but the old man didn’t
like it. It’s hard to know what some people will like. But it was my own
foolishness for asking. A thing like that is public property.”

“There’s a good deal of feeling,” said Lorne. “So much that I understand
the bank is moving for change of venue.”

“I hope they won’t get it,” said Dr Drummond sharply. “A strong local
feeling is valuable evidence in a case like this. I don’t half approve
this notion that a community can’t manage its own justice when it
happens to take an interest in the case. I’ve no more acquaintance with
the Squire than ‘How d’ye do?’ and I don’t know his son from Adam; but
I’d serve on the jury tomorrow if the Crown asked it, and there’s many
more like me.”

Mr Williams, who had made a brief note on his shirt cuff, restored his
pencil to his waistcoat pocket. “I shall oppose a change of venue,” said
he.




CHAPTER V

It was confidently expected by the Murchison family that when Stella was
old enough she would be a good deal in society. Stella, without doubt,
was well equipped for society; she had exactly those qualities which
appealed to it in Elgin, among which I will mention two--the quality
of being able to suggest that she was quite as good as anybody without
saying so, and the even more important quality of not being any better.
Other things being equal--those common worldly standards that prevailed
in Elgin as well as anywhere else in their degree--other things being
equal, this second simple quality was perhaps the most important of all.
Mr and Mrs Murchison made no claim and small attempt upon society. One
doubts whether, with children coming fast and hard times long at the
door, they gave the subject much consideration; but if they did, it is
highly unlikely to have occurred to them that they were too good
for their environment. Yet in a manner they were. It was a matter of
quality, of spiritual and mental fabric; they were hardly aware that
they had it, but it marked them with a difference, and a difference is
the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own
intelligible averages, will not tolerate. The unusual may take on
an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is
understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is
regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among
law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation. It is a sound enough social
principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of
temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons. Such
a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius, emancipated from
the common interests, possibly inimical to the general good; and when,
later on, your genius takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he
has and gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd nods
before the vindicating fact.

Nobody knew it at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons’ case. They
had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren’t
going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration.
Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was
out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms. Once as a
little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it
home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison’s reception of the suggested
duty may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances--a trick like
that! The inevitable hour arrived when she should be instructed on
the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was
discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after
her. She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage
informed her family that it was a waste of money. She would hide in
the hayloft with a novel; she would be off by herself in a canoe at
six o’clock in the morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy
October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along in front of
her “in a dream.” No one could dream with impunity in Elgin, except
in bed. Mothers of daughters sympathized in good set terms with Mrs
Murchison. “If that girl were mine--” they would say, and leave you with
a stimulated notion of the value of corporal punishment. When she took
to passing examinations and teaching, Elgin considered that her parents
ought to be thankful in the probability that she had escaped some
dramatic end. But her occupation further removed her from intercourse
with the town’s more exclusive circles: she had taken a definite line,
and she pursued it, preoccupied. If she was a brand snatched from the
burning, she sent up a little curl of reflection in a safe place, where
she was not further interrupted.

Abby, inheriting all these prejudices, had nevertheless not done so
badly; she had taken no time at all to establish herself; she had almost
immediately married. In the social estimates of Elgin the Johnsons were
“nice people,” Dr Henry was a fine old figure in the town, and Abby’s
chances were good enough. At all events, when she opened her doors as
a bride, receiving for three afternoons in her wedding dress, everybody
had “called.” It was very distinctly understood, of course, that this
was a civility that need not lead to anything whatever, a kind of bowing
recognition, to be formally returned and quite possibly to end there.
With Abby, in a good many cases, it hadn’t ended there; she was doing
very well, and as she often said with private satisfaction, if she went
out anywhere she was just as likely as not to meet her brothers. Elgin
society, shaping itself, I suppose, to ultimate increase and prosperity,
had this peculiarity, that the females of a family, in general
acceptance, were apt to lag far behind the males. Alec and Oliver
enjoyed a good deal of popularity, and it was Stella’s boast that if
Lorne didn’t go out much it needn’t be supposed he wasn’t asked. It was
an accepted state of things in Elgin that young men might be invited
without their sisters, implying an imperturbability greater than
London’s, since London may not be aware of the existence of sisters,
while Elgin knew all sorts of more interesting things about them. The
young men were more desirable than the young women; they forged ahead,
carrying the family fortunes, and the “nicest” of them were the young
men in the banks. Others might be more substantial, but there was an
allure about a young man in a bank as difficult to define as to resist.
To say of a certain party-giver that she had “about every bank clerk
in town” was to announce the success of her entertainment in ultimate
terms. These things are not always penetrable, but no doubt his
gentlemanly form of labour and its abridgement in the afternoons, when
other young men toiled on till the stroke of six, had something to do
with this apotheosis of the bank clerk, as well as his invariable taste
in tailoring, and the fact that some local family influence was probably
represented in his appointment. Privilege has always its last little
stronghold, and it still operates to admiration on the office stools of
minor finance in towns like Elgin. At all events, the sprouting tellers
and cashiers held unquestioned sway--young doctors and lawyers simply
didn’t think of competing; and since this sort of thing carries its own
penalty, the designation which they shared with so many distinguished
persons in history became a byword on the lips of envious persons
and small boys, by which they wished to express effeminacy and the
substantive of the “stuck-up.” “D’ye take me fur a bank clurk?” was
a form of repudiation among corner loafers as forcible as it was
unjustifiable.

I seem to have embarked, by way of getting to the Milburns’ party--there
is a party at the Milburns’ and some of us are going--upon an analysis
of social principles in Elgin, an adventure of difficulty, as I have
once or twice hinted, but one from which I cannot well extricate myself
without at least leaving a clue or two more for the use of the curious.
No doubt these rules had their nucleus in the half-dozen families, among
whom we may count the shadowy Plummers, who took upon themselves for
Fox County, by the King’s pleasure, the administration of justice, the
practice of medicine and of the law, and the performance of the charges
of the Church of England a long time ago. Such persons would bring their
lines of demarcation with them, and in their new milieu of backwoods
settlers and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them
again. But it was a very long time ago. The little knot of gentry-folk
soon found the limitations of their new conditions; years went by in
decades, aggrandizing none of them. They took, perforce, to the ways
of the country, and soon nobody kept a groom but the Doctor, and nobody
dined late but the Judge. There came a time when the Sheriff’s whist
club and the Archdeacon’s port became a tradition to the oldest
inhabitant. Trade flourished, education improved, politics changed. Her
Majesty removed her troops--the Dominion wouldn’t pay, a poor-spirited
business--and a bulwark went with the regiment. The original dignified
group broke, dissolved, scattered. Prosperous traders foreclosed them,
the spirit of the times defeated them, young Liberals succeeded them in
office. Their grandsons married the daughters of well-to-do persons who
came from the north of Ireland, the east of Scotland, and the Lord knows
where. It was a sorry tale of disintegration with a cheerful sequel of
rebuilding, leading to a little unavoidable confusion as the edifice
went up. Any process of blending implies confusion to begin with; we are
here at the making of a nation.

This large consideration must dispose of small anomalies, such as the
acceptance, without cant, of certain forms of the shop, euphemized as
the store, but containing the same old vertebral counter. Not all forms.
Dry-goods were held in respect and chemists in comparative esteem; house
furnishings and hardware made an appreciable claim, and quite a leading
family was occupied with seed grains. Groceries, on the other hand, were
harder to swallow, possibly on account of the apron, though the grocer’s
apron, being of linen, had several degrees more consideration than
the shoemaker’s, which was of leather; smaller trades made smaller
pretensions; Mrs Milburn could tell you where to draw the line.
They were all hard-working folk together, but they had their little
prejudices: the dentist was known as “Doc,” but he was not considered
quite on a medical level; it was doubtful whether you bowed to the
piano-tuner, and quite a curious and unreasonable contempt was bound up
in the word “veterinary.” Anything “wholesale” or manufacturing stood,
of course, on its own feet; there was nothing ridiculous in molasses,
nothing objectionable in a tannery, nothing amusing in soap. Such airs
and graces were far from Elgin, too fundamentally occupied with the
amount of capital invested, and too profoundly aware how hard it was to
come by. The valuable part of it all was a certain bright freedom, and
this was of the essence. Trade was a decent communal way of making a
living, rooted in independence and the general need; it had none of
the meaner aspects. Your bow was negligible to the piano-tuner, and
everything veterinary held up its head. And all this again qualified,
as everywhere, by the presence or absence of the social faculty, that
magnetic capacity for coming, as Mrs Murchison would say, “to the fore,”
 which makes little of disadvantages that might seem insuperable and, in
default, renders null and void the most unquestionable claims. Anyone
would think of the Delarues. Mr Delarue had in the dim past married his
milliner, yet the Delarues were now very much indeed to the fore. And,
on the other hand, the Leverets of the saw mills, rich and benevolent;
the Leverets were not in society simply, if you analysed it, because
they did not appear to expect to be in it. Certainly it was well not to
be too modest; assuredly, as Mrs Murchison said, you put your own ticket
on, though that dear soul never marked herself in very plain figures,
not knowing, perhaps for one thing, quite how much she was worth. On the
other hand, “Scarce of company, welcome trumpery,” Mrs Murchison always
emphatically declared to be no part of her social philosophy. The upshot
was that the Murchisons were confined to a few old friends and looked,
as we know, half-humorously, half-ironically, for more brilliant
excursions, to Stella and “the boys.”

It was only, however, the pleasure of Mr Lorne Murchison’s company that
was requested at the Milburns’ dance. Almost alone among those who had
slipped into wider and more promiscuous circles with the widening of the
stream, the Milburns had made something like an effort to hold out.
The resisting power was not thought to reside in Mr Milburn, who was
personally aware of no special ground for it, but in Mrs Milburn and her
sister, Miss Filkin, who seemed to have inherited the strongest ideas.
in the phrase of the place, about keeping themselves to themselves.
A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far from the
fountainhead, with its pleasing proof that such views were once the most
general and the most sacred defence of middle-class firesides, and
that Thackeray had, after all, a good deal to excuse him. Crossing
the Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all that was
possible to conserve them under very adverse conditions Mrs Milburn
and Miss Filkin made it their duty to do. Nor were these ideas opposed,
contested, or much traversed in Elgin. It was recognized that there was
“something about” Mrs Milburn and her sister--vaguely felt--that you did
not come upon that thinness of nostril, and slope of shoulder, and set
of elbow at every corner. They must have got it somewhere. A Filkin
tradition prevailed, said to have originated in Nova Scotia: the Filkins
never had been accessible, but if they wanted to keep to themselves, let
them. In this respect Dora Milburn, the only child, was said to be her
mother’s own daughter. The shoulders, at all events, testified to it;
and the young lady had been taught to speak, like Mrs Milburn, with what
was known as an “English accent.” The accent in general use in Elgin was
borrowed--let us hope temporarily--from the other side of the line. It
suffered local modifications and exaggerations, but it was clearly an
American product. The English accent was thoroughly affected, especially
the broad “a.” The time may come when Elgin will be at considerable
pains to teach itself the broad “a,” but that is in the embroidery of
the future, and in no way modifies the criticism of Dora Milburn.

Lorne Murchison, however, was invited to the dance. The invitation
reached him through the post: coming home from office early on Saturday
he produced it from his pocket. Mrs Murchison and Abby sat on the
verandah enjoying the Indian summer afternoon; the horse chestnuts
dropped crashing among the fallen leaves, the roadside maples blazed,
the quiet streets ran into smoky purple, and one belated robin hopped
about the lawn. Mrs Murchison had just remarked that she didn’t know
why, at this time of year, you always felt as if you were waiting for
something.

“Well, I hope you feel honoured,” remarked Abby. Not one of them
would have thought that Lorne should feel especially honoured; but the
insincerity was so obvious that it didn’t matter. Mrs Murchison, cocking
her head to read the card, tried hard not to look pleased.

“Mrs Milburn. At Home,” she read. “Dancing. Well she might be at home
dancing, for all me! Why couldn’t she just write you a little friendly
note, or let Dora do it? It’s that Ormiston case,” she went on shrewdly.
“They know you’re taking a lot of trouble about it. And the least they
could do, too.”

Lorne sat down on the edge of the verandah with his hands in his
trousers pockets, and stuck his long legs out in front of him. “Oh, I
don’t know,” he said. “They have the name of being nifty, but I haven’t
got anything against the Milburns.”

“Name!” ejaculated Mrs Murchison. “Now long ago was it the Episcopalians
began that sewing-circle business for the destitute clergy of
Saskatchewan?”

“Mother!” put in Abby, with deprecation.

“Well, I won’t be certain about the clergy, but I tell you it had to do
with Saskatchewan, for that I remember! And anyhow, the first meeting
was held at the Milburns’--members lent their drawing-rooms. Well, Mrs
Leveret and Mrs Delarue went to the meeting--they were very thick just
then, the Leverets and the Delarues. They were so pleased to be going
that they got there about five minutes too soon, and they were the first
to come. Well, they rang the bell and in they went. The girl showed them
into the front drawing-room and asked them to sit down. And there in the
back drawing-room sat Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin, AND NEVER SPOKE TO
THEM! Took not the smallest notice, any more than if they had been stray
cats--not so much! Their own denomination, mind you, too! And there they
might have been sitting still if Mrs Leveret hadn’t had the spirit to
get up and march out. No thank you. No Milburns for me.”

Lorne watched his mother with twinkling eyes till she finished.

“Well, Mother, after that, if it was going to be a sewing circle I think
I’d send an excuse,” he said, “but maybe they won’t be so mean at a
dance.”




CHAPTER VI

Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to being considered,
with relation to his own line in life, a representative man. He would
have been wary to claim it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided
at this view of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the
stranger’s power of induction. That is what he was--a man of averages,
balances, the safe level, no more disposed to an extravagant opinion
than to wear one side whisker longer than the other. You would take him
any day, especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct medium:
by his careful walk with the spring in it, his shrewd glance with
the caution in it, his look of being prepared to account for himself,
categorically, from head to foot. He was fond of explaining, in
connection with an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago,
that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a fortune under
the Stars and Stripes. There we have the turn of his mind, convertible
into the language of bookkeeping, a balance struck, with the profit on
the side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound terms of
dollars and cents. With this position understood, he was prepared to
take you up on any point of comparison between the status and privileges
of a subject and a citizen--the political MORALE of a monarchy and a
republic--the advantage of life on this and the other side of the line.
There was nothing he liked better to expatiate upon, with that
valuable proof of his own sincerity always at hand for reference
and illustration. His ideal was life in a practical, go-ahead,
self-governing colony, far enough from England actually to be disabused
of her inherited anachronisms and make your own tariff, near enough
politically to keep your securities up by virtue of her protection. He
was extremely satisfied with his own country; one saw in his talk the
phenomenon of patriotism in double bloom, flower within flower. I have
mentioned his side whiskers: he preserved that facial decoration of
the Prince Consort; and the large steel engraving that represents Queen
Victoria in a flowing habit and the Prince in a double-breasted frock
coat and a stock, on horseback, hung over the mantelpiece in his
drawing-room. If the outer patriotism was a little vague, the inner had
vigour enough. Canada was a great place. Mr Milburn had been born in the
country, and had never “gone over” to England; Canada was good enough
for him. He was born, one might say, in the manufacturing interest, and
inherited the complacent and Conservative political views of a tenderly
nourished industry. Mr Milburn was of those who were building up the
country; with sufficient protection he was prepared to go on doing it
long and loyally; meanwhile he admired the structure from all points of
view. As President of the Elgin Chamber of Commerce, he was enabled once
a year to produce no end of gratifying figures; he was fond of wearing
on such occasions the national emblem in a little enamelled maple leaf;
and his portrait and biography occupied a full page in a sumptuous
work entitled Canadians of Today, sold by subscription, where he was
described as the “Father of the Elgin Boiler.”

Mr and Mrs Milburn were in the drawing-room to receive their young
guests, a circumstance which alone imparted a distinction to the
entertainment. At such parties the appearance of the heads of the house
was by no means invariable; frequently they went to bed. The simple
explanation was that the young people could stand late hours and be none
the worse next day; their elders had to be more careful if they wanted
to get down to business. Moreover, as in all new societies, between the
older and the younger generation there was a great gulf fixed, across
which intercourse was difficult. The sons and daughters, born to
different circumstances, evolved their own conventions, the old people
used the ways and manners of narrower days; one paralysed the other. It
might be gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address
of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former; but
polite conversation, at best, was sustained with discomfort. Such
considerations, however, were far from operating with the Milburns.
Mrs Milburn would have said that they were characteristic of quite a
different class of people; and so they were.

No one would have supposed, from the way in which the family disposed
itself in the drawing-room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished
making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till
the last minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a distinct
understanding with the maid--Mrs Milburn’s servants were all “maids,”
 even the charwoman, who had buried three husbands--on the subject of
wearing a cap when she answered the door. Mrs Milburn sat on a chair
she had worked herself, occupied with something in the new stitch; Dora
performed lightly at the piano; Miss Filkin dipped into Selections
from the Poets of the Century, placed as remotely as possible from the
others; Mr Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a Toronto
evening paper. Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected to the evening paper
in the drawing-room. “Won’t you look at a magazine, Octavius?” she said;
but Mr Milburn advanced the argument that it removed “any appearance
of stiffness,” and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more
disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes
of people; indeed, when Mr Lorne Murchison arrived--like the unfortunate
Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, he was the first--they looked almost
surprised to see him.

Lorne told his mother afterward that he thought, in that embarrassing
circumstance, of Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue, and they laughed
consumedly together over his discomforture; but what he felt at the
moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and
solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in
Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the
entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin
would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the
thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would
have so walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not minding,
by next morning he didn’t mind; but immediately he was fast tied in the
cobwebs of the common prescription, and he made his way to each of the
points of the compass of the Milburns’ drawing-room to shake hands,
burning to the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn he
grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and drew it forward,
a trick he had with his gown in court, a nervous and mechanical
action. Dora, who continued to play, watched him over the piano with
an amusement not untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with
several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite beautifully, and she
had a remarkable, effective, useful reticence. Her father declared
that Dora took in a great deal more than she ever gave out--an
accomplishment, in Mr Milburn’s eyes, on the soundest basis. She looked
remarkably pretty and had remarkably good style, and as she proceeded
with her mazurka she was thinking, “He has never been asked here before:
how perfectly silly he must feel coming so early!” Presently as Lorne
grew absorbed in talk and forgot his unhappy chance, she further
reflected, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him till now in evening
dress; it does make him a good figure.” This went on behind a faultless
coiffure and an expression almost classical in its detachment; but if
Miss Milburn could have thought on a level with her looks I, for one,
would hesitate to take any liberty with her meditations.

However, the bell began to ring with the briefest intermissions, the
maid in the cap to make constant journeys. She opened the door with a
welcoming smile, having practically no deportment to go with the cap:
human nature does not freeze readily anywhere. Dora had to leave the
piano: Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen had come she would change
her chair. Fifteen soon came, the young ladies mostly in light silks
or muslins cut square, not low, in the neck, with half-sleeves. This
moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress was more a
matter of material than of cut, a thing in itself symbolical if it were
desirable to consider social evolution here. For middle-aged ladies high
necks and long sleeves were usual; and Mrs Milburn might almost have
been expected to appear thus, in a nicely made black broche, perhaps. It
was recognized as like Mrs Milburn, in keeping with her unbending ideas,
to wear a dress cut as square as any young lady’s, with just a little
lace let in, of a lavender stripe. The young men were nearly all in the
tailor’s convention for their sex the world over, with here and there
a short coat that also went to church; but there some departures from
orthodoxy in the matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were
achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed of defending
them from the charge of being ready-made.

It was a clear, cold January night and everybody, as usual, walked to
the party; the snow creaked and ground underfoot, one could hear the
arriving steps in the drawing-room. They stamped and scraped to get rid
of it in the porch, and hurried through the hall, muffled figures in
overshoes, to emerge from an upstairs bedroom radiant, putting a last
touch to hair and button hole, smelling of the fresh winter air. Such
gatherings usually consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with
one or two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had not yet
changed the plane of existence; married people, by general consent,
left these amusements to the unculled. They had, as I have hinted,
more serious preoccupations, “something else to do”; nobody thought of
inviting them. Nobody, that is, but Mrs Milburn and a few others of her
way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety in a mixture.
On this occasion she had asked her own clergyman, the pleasant-faced
rector of St Stephen’s, and Mrs Emmett, who wore that pathetic
expression of fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation
at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr Winter had the
distinction of having contested South Fox in the Conservative interest
three time unsuccessfully. Undeterred, he went on contesting things:
invariably beaten, he invariably came up smiling and ready to try
again. His imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost heart or
dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he ever cease to impress
his party as being their most useful and acceptable representative.
His business history was chequered and his exact financial equivalent
uncertain, but he had tremendously the air of a man of affairs; as
the phrase went, he was full of politics, the plain repository of deep
things. He had a shrewd eye, a double chin, and a bluff, crisp, jovial
manner of talking as he lay back in an armchair with his legs crossed
and played with his watch chain, an important way of nodding assent,
a weighty shake of denial. Voting on purely party lines, the town had
later rewarded his invincible expectation by electing him Mayor, and
then provided itself with unlimited entertainment by putting in a
Liberal majority on his council, the reports of the weekly sittings
being constantly considered as good as a cake walk. South Fox, as people
said, was not a healthy locality for Conservatives. Yet Walter Winter
wore a look of remarkable hardiness. He had also tremendously the air
of a dark horse, the result both of natural selection and careful
cultivation. Even his political enemies took it kindly when he “got in”
 for Mayor, and offered him amused congratulations. He made a personal
claim on their cordiality, which was not the least of his political
resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the impression
overflowed the ranks of his own supporters and softened asperity among
his opponents. Illustration lies, at this moment close to us. They had
not been in the same room a quarter of an hour before he was in deep
and affectionate converse with Lorne Murchison, whose party we know,
and whose political weight was increasing, as this influence often does,
with a rapidity out of proportion with his professional and general
significance.

“It’s a pity now,” said Mr Winter, with genial interest, “you can’t get
that Ormiston defence into your own hands. Very useful thing for you.”

The younger man shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. It is one
thing to entertain a private vision and another to see it materialized
on other lips.

“Oh I’d like it well enough,” he said, “but it’s out of the question, of
course. I’m too small potatoes.”

“There’s a lot of feeling for old Ormiston. Folks out there on the
Reserve don’t know how to show it enough.”

“They’ve shown it a great deal too much. We don’t want to win on
‘feeling,’ or have it said either. And we were as near as possible
having to take the case to the Hamilton Assizes.”

“I guess you were--I guess you were.” Mr Winter’s suddenly increased
gravity expressed his appreciation of the danger. “I saw Lister of the
Bank the day they heard from Toronto--rule refused. Never saw a man more
put out. Seems they considered the thing as good as settled. General
opinion was it would go to Hamilton, sure. Well I don’t know how you
pulled it off, but it was a smart piece of work, sir.”

Lorne encountered Mr Winter’s frank smile with an expression of crude
and rather stolid discomfort. It had a base of indignation, corrected by
a concession to the common idea that most events, with an issue pendent,
were the result of a smart piece of work: a kind of awkward shrug was in
it. He had no desire to be unpleasant to Walter Winter--on the contrary.
Nevertheless, an uncompromising line came on each side of his mouth with
his reply.

“As far as I know,” he said, “the application was dismissed on its
demerits.”

“Of course it was,” said Mr Winter good-humouredly. “You don’t need to
tell me that. Well, now, this looks like dancing. Miss Filkin, I see, is
going to oblige on the piano. Now I wonder whether I’m going to get Miss
Dora to give me a waltz or not.”

Chairs and table were in effect being pushed back, and folding doors
opened which disclosed another room prepared for this relaxation. Miss
Filkin began to oblige vigorously on the piano, Miss Dora granted Mr
Winter’s request, which he made with elaborate humour as an impudent old
bachelor whom “the boys” would presently take outside and kill. Lorne
watched him make it, envying him his assurance; and Miss Milburn was
aware that he watched and aware that he envied. The room filled with
gaiety and movement: Mr Milburn, sidling dramatically along the wall to
escape the rotatory couples, admonished Mr Murchison to get a partner.
He withdrew himself from the observation of Miss Dora and Mr Winter, and
approached a young lady on a sofa, who said “With very great pleasure.”
 When the dance was over he re-established the young lady on the sofa
and fanned her with energy. Looking across the room, he saw that
Walter Winter, seated beside Dora, was fanning himself. He thought
it disgusting and, for some reason which he did not pause to explore,
exactly like Winter. He had met Miss Milburn once or twice before
without seeing her in any special way: here, at home, the centre of the
little conventions that at once protected and revealed her, conventions
bound up in the impressive figures of her mother and her aunt, she had
a new interest, and all the attraction of that which is not easily come
by. It is also possible that although Lorne had met her before, she
had not met him; she was meeting him now for the first time, as she
sat directly opposite and talked very gracefully to Walter Winter.
Addressing Walter Winter, Lorne was the object of her pretty remarks.
While Mr Winter had her superficial attention, he was the bland medium
which handed her on. Her consciousness was fixed on young Mr Murchison,
quite occupied with him: she could not imagine why they had not asked
him long ago; he wasn’t exactly “swell,” but you could see he was
somebody. So already she figured the potential distinction in the set
of his shoulders and the carriage of his head. It might have been
translated in simple terms of integrity and force by anyone who looked
for those things. Miss Milburn was incapable of such detail, but she saw
truly enough in the mass.

Lorne, on the opposite sofa, looked at her across the town’s traditions
of Milburn exclusiveness. Oddly enough, at this moment when he might
have considered that he had overcome them, they seemed to gather force,
exactly in his line of vision. He had never before been so near Dora
Milburn, and he had never before perceived her so remote. He had a sense
of her distance beyond those few yards of carpet quite incompatible
with the fact. It weighed upon him, but until she sent him a sudden
unexpected smile he did not know how heavily. It was a dissipating
smile; nothing remained before it. Lorne carefully restored his
partner’s fan, bowed before her, and went straight across the room.




CHAPTER VII

It is determined with something like humour that communities very young
should occupy themselves almost altogether with matters of grave and
serious import. The vision of life at that period is no doubt unimpeded
and clear; its conditions offer themselves with a certain nakedness and
force, both as to this world and to that which is to come. The town of
Elgin thus knew two controlling interests--the interest of politics
and the interest of religion. Both are terms we must nevertheless
circumscribe. Politics wore a complexion strictly local, provincial,
or Dominion. The last step of France in Siam, the disputed influence of
Germany in the Persian Gulf, the struggle of the Powers in China were
not matters greatly talked over in Elgin; the theatre of European
diplomacy had no absorbed spectators here. Nor can I claim that interest
in the affairs of Great Britain was in any way extravagant.

A sentiment of affection for the reigning house certainly prevailed. It
was arbitrary, rococo, unrelated to current conditions as a tradition
sung down in a ballad, an anachronism of the heart, cherished through
long rude lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it--when you consider,
beauty and poetry can be thought of in this. Here was no Court aiding
the transmutation of the middle class, no King spending money; here
were no picturesque contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry,
no blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an occasional
telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an event of public
importance, a suitable emotion. Yet the common love for the throne
amounted to a half-ashamed enthusiasm that burned with something like
a sacred flame, and was among the things not ordinarily alluded to,
because of the shyness that attaches to all feeling that cannot be
justified in plain terms. A sentiment of affection for the reigning
house certainly prevailed; but it was a thing by itself. The fall of
a British Government would hardly fail to excite comment, and the
retirement of a Prime Minister would induce both the Mercury and the
Express to publish a biographical sketch of him, considerably shorter
than the leader embodying the editor’s views as to who should get
the electric light contract. But the Government might become the sole
employer of labour in those islands, Church and school might part
company for ever, landlords might be deprived of all but compassionate
allowances and, except for the degree of extravagance involved in these
propositions, they would hardly be current in Elgin. The complications
of England’s foreign policy were less significant still. It was
recognized dimly that England had a foreign policy, more or less had
to have it, as they would have said in Elgin; it was part of the huge
unnecessary scheme of things for which she was responsible--unnecessary
from Elgin’s point of view as a father’s financial obligations might be
to a child he had parted with at birth. It all lay outside the facts
of life, far beyond the actual horizon, like the affairs of a distant
relation from whom one has nothing to hope, not even personal contact,
and of whose wealth and greatness one does not boast much, because of
the irony involved. Information upon all these matters was duly put
before Elgin every morning in the telegrams of the Toronto papers; the
information came, until the other day, over cables to New York and was
disseminated by American news agencies. It was, therefore, not devoid of
bias; but if this was perceived it was by no means thought a matter
for protesting measures, especially as they would be bound to involve
expense. The injury was too vague, too remote, to be more than sturdily
discounted by a mental attitude. Belief in England was in the blood,
it would not yield to the temporary distortion of facts in the
newspapers--at all events, it would not yield with a rush. Whether there
was any chance of insidious sapping was precisely what the country was
too indifferent to discover. Indifferent, apathetic, self-centred--until
whenever, down the wind, across the Atlantic, came the faint far music
of the call to arms. Then the old dog of war that has his kennel in
every man rose and shook himself, and presently there would be a
baying! The sense of kinship, lying too deep for the touch of ordinary
circumstance, quickened to that; and in a moment “we” were fighting,
“we” had lost or won.

Apart, however, from the extraordinary, the politics of Elgin’s daily
absorption were those of the town, the Province, the Dominion. Centres
of small circumference yield a quick swing; the concern of the average
intelligent Englishman as to the consolidation of his country’s
interests in the Yangtse Valley would be a languid manifestation beside
that of an Elgin elector in the chances of an appropriation for a
new court house. The single mind is the most fervid: Elgin had few
distractions from the question of the court house or the branch line
to Clayfield. The arts conspired to be absent; letters resided at the
nearest university city; science was imported as required, in practical
improvements. There was nothing, indeed, to interfere with Elgin’s
attention to the immediate, the vital, the municipal: one might almost
read this concentration of interest in the white dust of the rambling
streets, and the shutters closed against it. Like other movements of the
single mind, it had something of the ferocious, of the inflexible, of
the unintelligent; but it proudly wore the character of the go-ahead
and, as Walter Winter would have pointed out to you, it had granted
eleven bonuses to “capture” sound commercial concerns in six years.

In wholesome fear of mistake, one would hesitate to put church matters
either before or after politics among the preoccupations of Elgin. It
would be safer and more indisputable to say that nothing compared with
religion but politics, and nothing compared with politics but religion.
In offering this proposition also we must think of our dimensions. There
is a religious fervour in Oxford, in Mecca, in Benares, and the sign
for these ideas is the same; we have to apply ourselves to the
interpretation. In Elgin religious fervour was not beautiful, or
dramatic, or self-immolating; it was reasonable. You were perhaps
your own first creditor; after that your debt was to your Maker. You
discharged this obligation in a spirit of sturdy equity: if the children
didn’t go to Sunday school you knew the reason why. The habit of church
attendance was not only a basis of respectability, but practically the
only one: a person who was “never known to put his head inside a church
door” could not be more severely reprobated, by Mrs Murchison at all
events. It was the normal thing, the thing which formed the backbone of
life, sustaining to the serious, impressive to the light, indispensable
to the rest, and the thing that was more than any of these, which you
can only know when you stand in the churches among the congregations.
Within its prescribed limitations it was for many the intellectual
exercise, for more the emotional lift, and for all the unfailing
distraction of the week. The repressed magnetic excitement in gatherings
of familiar faces, fellow-beings bound by the same convention to the
same kind of behaviour, is precious in communities where the human
interest is still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it
produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the case, in Dr
Drummond’s church, of placid-faced, saintly old Sandy MacQuhot, the
epileptic. It used to be a common regret with Lorne Murchison that as
sure as he was allowed to stay away from church Sandy would have a
fit. That was his little boy’s honesty; the elders enjoyed the fit and
deprecated the disturbance.

There was a simple and definite family feeling within communions. “They
come to our church” was the argument of first force whether for calling
or for charity. It was impossible to feel toward a Congregationalist or
an Episcopalian as you felt toward one who sang the same hymns and
sat under the same admonition week by week, year in and year out, as
yourself. “Wesleyans, are they?” a lady of Knox Church would remark of
the newly arrived, in whom her interest was suggested. “Then let the
Wesleyans look after them.” A pew-holder had a distinct status; an
“adherent” enjoyed friendly consideration, especially if he adhered
faithfully; and stray attendants from other congregations were treated
with punctilious hospitality, places being found for them in the Old
Testament, as if they could hardly be expected to discover such things
for themselves. The religious interest had also the strongest domestic
character in quite another sense from that of the family prayers which
Dr Drummond was always enjoying. “Set your own house in order and then
your own church” was a wordless working precept in Elgin. Threadbare
carpet in the aisles was almost as personal a reproach as a hole
under the dining-room table; and self-respect was barely possible to a
congregation that sat in faded pews. The minister’s gown even was the
subject of scrutiny as the years went on. It was an expensive thing to
buy, but an oyster supper would do it and leave something over for the
organ. Which brings us to the very core and centre of these activities,
their pivot, their focus and, in a human sense, their inspiration--the
minister himself.

The minister was curiously special among a people so general; he was in
a manner raised in life on weekdays as he was in the pulpit on Sundays.
He had what one might call prestige; some form of authority still
survived in his person, to which the spiritual democracy he presided
over gave a humorous, voluntary assent. He was supposed to be a person
of undetermined leisure--what was writing two sermons a week to earn
your living by?--and he was probably the more reverend, or the more
revered, from the fact that he was in the house all day. A particular
importance attached to everything he said and did; he was a person whose
life answered different springs, and was sustained on quite another
principle than that of supply and demand. The province of public
criticism was his; but his people made up for the meekness with which
they sat under it by a generous use of the corresponding privilege in
private. Comments upon the minister partook of hardiness; it was as
if the members were determined to live up to the fact that the
office-bearers could reduce his salary if they liked. Needless to say,
they never did like. Congregations stood loyally by their pastors, and
discussion was strictly intramural. If the Methodists handed theirs on
at the end of three years with a breath of relief, they exhaled it
among themselves; after all, for them it was a matter of luck. The
Presbyterians, as in the case of old Mr Jamesion of St Andrew’s, held
on till death, pulling a long upper lip: election was not a thing to be
trifled with in heaven or upon earth.

It will be imagined whether Dr Drummond did not see in these conditions
his natural and wholesome element, whether he did not fit exactly in.
The God he loved to worship as Jehovah had made him a beneficent despot
and given him, as it were, a commission. If the temporal power had
charged him to rule an eastern province, he would have brought much the
same qualities to the task. Knox Church, Elgin, was his dominion, its
moral and material affairs his jealous interest, and its legitimate
expansion his chief pride. In “anniversary” sermons, which he always
announced the Sunday before, he seldom refrained from contrasting
the number on the roll of church membership, then and now, with the
particular increase in the year just closed. If the increase
was satisfactory, he made little comment beyond the duty of
thanksgiving--figures spoke for themselves. If it was otherwise Dr
Drummond’s displeasure was not a thing he would conceal. He would wing
it eloquently on the shaft of his grief that the harvest had been so
light; but he would more than hint the possibility that the labourers
had been few. Most important among his statistics was the number of
young communicants. Wanderers from other folds he admitted, with a
not wholly satisfied eye upon their early theological training, and to
persons duly accredited from Presbyterian churches elsewhere he gave the
right hand of fellowship; but the young people of his own congregation
were his chief concern always, and if a gratifying number of these had
failed to “come forward” during the year, the responsibility must
lie somewhere. Dr Drummond was willing to take his own share; “the
ministrations of this pulpit” would be more than suspected of having
come short, and the admission would enable him to tax the rest upon
parents and Bible-class teachers with searching effect. The congregation
would go gloomily home to dinner, and old Sandy MacQuhot would remark
to his wife, “It’s hard to say why will the Doctor get himself in sic
a state aboot mere numbers. We’re told ‘where two or three are gathered
together.’ But the Doctor’s all for a grand congregation.”

Knox Church, under such auspices could hardly fail to enlarge her
borders; but Elgin enlarged hers faster. Almost before you knew where
you were there spread out the district of East Elgin, all stacks of tall
chimneys and rows of little houses. East Elgin was not an attractive
locality; it suffered from inundation sometimes, when the river was in
spring flood; it gave unresentful room to a tannery. It was the home of
dubious practices at the polls, and the invariable hunting-ground for
domestic servants. Nevertheless, in the view of Knox Church, it could
not bear a character wholly degraded; too many Presbyterians, Scotch
foremen, and others, had their respectable residence there. For these it
was a far cry to Dr Drummond in bad weather, and there began to be talk
of hiring the East Elgin schoolhouse for Sunday exercises if suitable
persons could be got to come over from Knox Church and lead them. I do
not know who was found to broach the matter to Dr Drummond; report says
his relative and housekeeper, Mrs Forsyth, who perhaps might do it under
circumstances of strategical advantage. Mrs Forsyth, or whoever it was,
had her reply in the hidden terms of an equation--was it any farther for
the people of East Elgin to walk to hear him preach than for him to walk
to minister to the people of East Elgin, which he did quite once a week,
and if so, how much? Mrs Forsyth, or whoever it was, might eliminate
the unknown quantity. It cannot be said that Dr Drummond discouraged the
project; he simply did not mention it and as it was known to have been
communicated to him this represented effectively the policy of the
closed door. He found himself even oftener in East Elgin, walking about
on his pastoral errands with a fierce briskness of aspect and a sharp
inquiring eye, before which one might say the proposition slunk
away. Meanwhile, the Methodists who, it seemed, could tolerate
decentralization, or anything short of round dances, opened a chapel
with a cheerful sociable, and popularized the practice of backsliding
among those for whom the position was theologically impossible. Good
Presbyterians in East Elgin began to turn into makeshift Methodists. The
Doctor missed certain occupants of the gallery seats and felt the logic
of circumstances. Here we must all yield, and the minister concealed
his discomfiture in a masterly initiative. The matter came up again at
a meeting of the church managers, brought up by Dr Drummond, who had
the satisfaction of hearing that a thing put into the Doctor’s hands was
already half done. In a very few weeks it was entirely done. The use
of the schoolhouse was granted through Dr Drummond’s influence with the
Board free of charge; and to understand the triumph of this it should be
taken into account that three of the trustees were Wesleyans. Services
were held regularly, certain of Dr Drummond’s elders officiating; and
the conventicle in the schoolhouse speedily became known as Knox Church
Mission. It grew and prospered. The first night “I to the hills will
lift mine eyes” went up from East Elgin on the uplifting tune that
belongs to it, the strayed came flocking back.

This kind never go forth again; once they refind the ark of the covenant
there they abide. In the course of time it became a question of a better
one, and money was raised locally to build it. Dr Drummond pronounced
the first benediction in Knox Mission Church, and waited, well knowing
human nature in its Presbyterian aspect, for the next development. It
came, and not later than he anticipated, in the form of a prayer to Knox
Church for help to obtain the services of a regularly ordained minister.
Dr Drummond had his guns ready: he opposed the application; where a
regularly ordained minister was already at the disposal of those who
chose to walk a mile and a half to hear him, the luxury of more locally
consecrated services should be at the charge of the locality. He himself
was willing to spend and be spent in the spiritual interests of East
Elgin; that was abundantly proven; what he could not comfortably
tolerate was the deviation of congregational funds, the very blood of
the body of belief, into other than legitimate channels. He fought
for his view with all his tactician’s resources, putting up one
office-bearer after another to endorse it but the matter was decided at
the general yearly meeting of the congregation; and the occasion showed
Knox Church in singular sympathy with its struggling offspring. Dr
Drummond for the first time in his ministry, was defeated by his people.
It was less a defeat than a defence, an unexpected rally round the
corporate right to direct corporate activities; and the congregation was
so anxious to wound the minister’s feelings as little as possible that
the grant in aid of the East Elgin Mission was embodied in a motion to
increase Dr Drummond’s salary by two hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The Doctor with a wry joke, swallowed his gilded pill, but no coating
could dissimulate its bitterness, and his chagrin was plain for long.
The issue with which we are immediately concerned is that three months
later Knox Church Mission called to minister to it the Reverend Hugh
Finlay, a young man from Dumfriesshire and not long out. Dr Drummond had
known beforehand what their choice would be. He had brought Mr Finlay to
occupy Knox Church pulpit during his last July and August vacation,
and Mrs Forsyth had reported that such midsummer congregations she
had simply never worshipped with. Mrs Forsyth was an excellent hand at
pressed tongue and a wonder at knitted counterpanes, but she had not
acquired tact and never would.




CHAPTER VIII

The suggestion that the Reverend Hugh Finlay preached from the pulpit
of Knox Church “better sermons” than its permanent occupant, would have
been justly considered absurd, and nobody pronounced it. The church was
full, as Mrs Forsyth observed, on these occasions; but there were many
other ways of accounting for that. The Murchisons, as a family, would
have been the last to make such an admission. The regular attendance
might have been, as much as anything, out of deference to the wishes
of the Doctor himself, who invariably and sternly hoped, in his last
sermon, that no stranger occupying his place would have to preach to
empty pews. He was thinking, of course, of old Mr Jamieson with whom he
occasionally exchanged and whose effect on the attendance had not failed
to reach him. With regard to Mr Jamieson he was compelled, in the end,
to resort to tactics: he omitted to announce the Sunday before that his
venerable neighbour would preach, and the congregation, outwitted,
had no resource but to sustain the beard-wagging old gentleman through
seventhly to the finish. There came a time when the dear human Doctor
also omitted to announce that Mr Finlay would preach, but for other
reasons, meanwhile, as Mrs Forsyth said, he had no difficulty in
conjuring a vacation congregation for his young substitute. They
came trooping, old and young. Mr and Mrs Murchison would survey their
creditable family rank with a secret compunction, remembering its
invariable gaps at other times, and then resolutely turn to the praise
of God with the reflection that one means to righteousness was as
blessed as another. They themselves never missed a Sunday, and as seldom
failed to remark on the way back that it was all very interesting, but
Mr Finlay couldn’t drive it home like the Doctor. There were times,
sparse and special occasions, when the Doctor himself made one of the
congregation. Then he would lean back luxuriously in the corner of
his own pew, his wiry little form half-lost in the upholstery his
arms folded, his knees crossed, his face all humorous indulgence; yes,
humorous. At the announcement of the text a twinkle would lodge in the
shrewd grey eyes and a smile but half-suppressed would settle about the
corners of the flexible mouth: he knew what the young fellow there would
be at. And as the young fellow proceeded, his points would be weighed to
the accompaniment of the Doctor’s pendent foot, which moved perpetually,
judiciously; while the smile sometimes deepened, sometimes lapsed, since
there were moments when any young fellow had to be taken seriously.
It was an attitude which only the Doctor was privileged to adopt thus
outwardly; but in private it was imitated all up and down the aisles,
where responsible heads of families sat considering the quality of the
manna that was offered them. When it fell from the lips of Mr Finlay the
verdict was, upon the whole, very favourable, as long as there was no
question of comparison with the Doctor.

There could be, indeed, very little question of such comparison. There
was a generation between them and a school, and to that you had to add
every set and cast of mind and body that can make men different. Dr
Drummond, in faith and practice, moved with precision along formal and
implicit lines; his orbit was established, and his operation within
it as unquestionable as the simplest exhibit of nature. He took in a
wonderful degree the stamp of the teaching of his adolescent period; not
a line was missing nor a precept; nor was the mould defaced by a single
wavering tendency of later date. Religious doctrine was to him a thing
for ever accomplished, to be accepted or rejected as a whole. He taught
eternal punishment and retribution, reconciling both with Divine love
and mercy; he liked to defeat the infidel with the crashing question,
“Who then was the architect of the Universe?” The celebrated among such
persons he pursued to their deathbeds; Voltaire and Rousseau owed their
reputation, with many persons in Knox Church, to their last moments and
to Dr Drummond. He had a triumphant invective which drew the mind from
chasms in logic, and a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when
he quoted great lines, from everything else. He loved the euphony of the
Old Testament; his sonorous delivery would lift a chapter from Isaiah to
the height of ritual, and every Psalm he read was a Magnificat whether
he would or no. The warrior in him was happy among the Princes of
Issachar; and the parallels he would find for modern events in the
annals of Judah and of Israel were astounding. Yet he kept a sharp eye
upon the daily paper, and his reference to current events would often
give his listeners an audacious sense of up-to-dateness which might have
been easily discounted by the argument they illustrated. The survivors
of a convulsion of nature, for instance, might have learned from his
lips the cause and kind of their disaster traced back forcibly to
local acquiescence in iniquity, and drawn unflinchingly from the text,
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” The militant history
of his Church was a passion with him; if ever he had to countenance
canonization he would have led off with Jenny Geddes. “A tremendous
Presbyterian” they called him in the town. To hear him give out a single
psalm, and sing it with his people, would convince anybody of that.
There was a choir, of course, but to the front pews, at all events, Dr
Drummond’s leading was more important than the choir’s. It was a note
of dauntless vigour, and it was plain by the regular forward jerk of his
surpliced shoulder that his foot was keeping time:

   Where the assemblies of the just
   And congregations are.

You could not help admiring, and you could not help respecting; you
were compelled by his natural force and his unqualified conviction, his
tireless energy and his sterling sort.

It is possible to understand, however, that after sitting for
twenty-five years under direction so unfailing and so uncompromising,
the congregation of Knox Church might turn with a moderate curiosity
to the spiritual indications of the Reverend Hugh Finlay. He was a
passionate romantic, and his body had shot up into a fitting temple for
such an inhabitant as his soul. He was a great long fellow, with a shock
of black hair and deep dreams in his eyes; his head was what people
called a type, a type I suppose of the simple motive and the noble
intention, the detached point of view and the somewhat indifferent
attitude to material things, as it may be humanly featured anywhere. His
face bore a confusion of ideals; he had the brow of a Covenanter and
the mouth of Adonais, the flame of religious ardour in his eyes and the
composure of perceived philosophy on his lips. He was fettered by an
impenetrable shyness; it was in the pulpit alone that he could expand,
and then only upon written lines, with hardly a gesture, and the most
perfunctory glances, at conscientious intervals, toward his hearers.
A poor creature, indeed, in this respect, Dr Drummond thought him--Dr
Drummond, who wore an untrammelled surplice which filled like an
agitated sail in his quick tacks from right to left. “The man loses half
his points,” said Dr Drummond. I doubt whether he did, people followed
so closely, though Sandy MacQuhot was of the general opinion when he
said that it would do nobody any harm if Mr Finlay would lift his head
oftener from the book.

Advena Murchison thought him the probable antitype of an Oxford don. She
had never seen an Oxford don, but Mr Finlay wore the characteristics
these schoolmen were dressed in by novelists; and Advena noted with
delight the ingenuity of fate in casting such a person into the pulpit
of the Presbyterian Church in a young country. She had her perception of
comedy in life; till Finlay came she had found nothing so interesting.
With his arrival, however, other preoccupations fell into their proper
places.

Finlay, indeed, it may be confessed at once, he and not his message was
her engrossment from the beginning. The message she took with reverent
gentleness; but her passionate interest was for the nature upon which
it travelled, and never for the briefest instant did she confuse these
emotions. Those who write, we are told transcribe themselves in spite
of themselves; it is more true of those who preach, for they are also
candid by profession, and when they are not there is the eye and the
voice to help to betray them. Hugh Finlay, in the pulpit, made himself
manifest in all the things that matter to Advena Murchison in the pew;
and from the pew to the pulpit her love went back with certainty, clear
in its authority and worshipping the ground of its justification. When
she bowed her head it was he whom she heard in the language of his
invocations; his doctrine rode, for her, on a spirit of wide and sweet
philosophy; in his contemplation of the Deity she saw the man. He had
those lips at once mobile, governed and patient, upon which genius
chooses oftenest to rest. As to this, Advena’s convictions were so
private as to be hidden from herself; she never admitted that she
thought Finlay had it, and in the supreme difficulty of proving anything
else we may wisely accept her view. But he had something, the subtle
Celt; he had horizons, lifted lines beyond the common vision, and an eye
rapt and a heart intrepid; and though for a long time he was unconscious
of it, he must have adventured there with a happier confidence because
of her companionship.

From the first Advena knew no faltering or fluttering, none of the baser
nervous betrayals. It was all one great delight to her, her discovery
and her knowledge and her love for him. It came to her almost in a
logical development; it found her grave, calm, and receptive. She had
even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to
everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive
with her in such a glorious defensible, demonstrable sequence. Toward
him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved and he was
unaware. She watched his academic awkwardness in church with the inward
tender smile of the eternal habile feminine, and when they met she could
have laughed and wept over his straightened sentences and his difficult
manner, knowing how little significant they were. With his eyes upon her
and his words offered to her intelligence, she found herself treating
his shy formality as the convention it was, a kind of make-believe which
she would politely and kindly play up to until he should happily forget
it and they could enter upon simpler relations. She had to play up to it
for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient;
and of course the day came when she had her reward. Knowing him as she
did, she remembered the day and the difference it made.

It was toward the end of an afternoon in early April; the discoloured
snow still lay huddled in the bleaker fence corners. Wide puddles stood
along the roadsides, reflecting the twigs and branches of the naked
maples; last year’s leaves were thick and wet underfoot, and a soft damp
wind was blowing. Advena was on her way home and Finlay overtook her.
He passed her at first, with a hurried silent lifting of his hat; then
perhaps the deserted street gave a suggestion of unfriendliness to his
act, or some freshness in her voice stayed him. At all events, he
waited and joined her, with a word or two about their going in the
same direction; and they walked along together. He offered her his
companionship, but he had nothing to say; the silence in which they
pursued their way was no doubt to him just the embarrassing condition he
usually had to contend with. To her it seemed pregnant, auspicious; it
drew something from the low grey lights of the wet spring afternoon and
the unbound heart-lifting wind; she had a passionate prevision that the
steps they took together would lead somehow to freedom. They went on in
that strange bound way, and the day drew away from them till they turned
a sudden corner, when it lay all along the yellow sky across the river,
behind a fringe of winter woods, stayed in the moment of its retreat on
the edge of unvexed landscape. They stopped involuntarily to look, and
she saw a smile come up from some depth in him.

“Ah, well,” he said, as if to himself, “it’s something to be in a
country where the sun still goes down with a thought of the primaeval.”

“I think I prefer the sophistication of chimney-pots,” she replied.
“I’ve always longed to see a sunset in London, with the fog breaking
over Westminster.”

“Then you don’t care about them for themselves, sunsets?” he asked, with
the simplest absence of mind.

“I never yet could see the sun go down, But I was angry in my heart,”
 she said, and this time he looked at her.

“How does it go on?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Only those two lines stay with me. I feel it that
way, too. It’s the seal upon an act of violence, isn’t it, a sunset?
Something taken from us against our will. It’s a hateful reminder, in
the midst of our delightful volitions, of how arbitrary every condition
of life is.”

“The conditions of business are always arbitrary. Life is a business--we
have to work at ourselves till it is over. So much cut off and ended it
is,” he said, glancing at the sky again. “If space is the area of life
and time is its opportunity, there goes a measure of opportunity.”

“I wonder,” said Advena, “where it goes?”

“Into the void behind time?” he suggested, smiling straight at her.

“Into the texture of the future,” she answered, smiling back.

“We might bring it to bear very intelligently on the future, at any
rate,” he returned. “The world is wrapped in destiny, and but revolves
to roll it out.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said curiously.

“No you couldn’t,” he laughed outright. “I haven’t thought it good
enough to publish.”

“And it isn’t the sort of thing,” she ventured gaily, “you could put in
a sermon.”

“No, it isn’t.” They came to a corner of the street which led to Mr
Finlay’s boarding-house. It stretched narrowly to the north and there
was a good deal more snow on each side of it. They lingered together for
a moment talking, seizing the new joy in it which was simply the joy of
his sudden liberation with her consciously pushing away the moment of
parting; and Finlay’s eyes rested once again on the evening sky beyond
the river.

“I believe you are right and I am a moralizer,” he said. “There IS
pain over there. One thinks a sunset beautiful and impressive, but one
doesn’t look at it long.”

Then they separated, and he took the road to the north, which was still
snowbound, while she went on into the chilly yellow west, with the odd
sweet illusion that a summer day was dawning.




CHAPTER IX

The office of Messrs Fulke, Warner, & Murchison was in Market Street,
exactly over Scott’s drug store. Scott with his globular blue and red
and green vessels in the window and his soda-water fountain inside; was
on the ground floor; the passage leading upstairs separated him from
Mickie, boots and shoes; and beyond Mickie, Elgin’s leading tobacconist
shared his place of business with a barber. The last two contributed
most to the gaiety of Market Street: the barber with the ribanded pole,
which stuck out at an angle; the tobacconist with a nobly featured squaw
in chocolate effigy who held her draperies under her chin with one hand
and outstretched a packet of cigars with the other.

The passage staircase between Scott’s and Mickie’s had a hardened look,
and bore witness to the habit of expectoration; ladies, going up to Dr
Simmons, held their skirts up and the corners of their mouths down. Dr
Simmons was the dentist: you turned to the right. The passage itself
turned to the left, and after passing two doors bearing the law firm’s
designation in black letters on ground glass, it conducted you with
abruptness to the office of a bicycle agent, and left you there.
For greater emphasis the name of the firm of Messrs Fulke, Warner &
Murchison was painted on the windows also; it could be seen from any
part of the market square, which lay, with the town hall in the middle,
immediately below. During four days in the week the market square was
empty. Odds and ends of straw and paper blew about it; an occasional
pedestrian crossed it diagonally for the short cut to the post-office;
the town hall rose in the middle, and defied you to take your mind off
the ugliness of municipal institutions. On the other days it was a scene
of activity. Farmers’ wagons, with the shafts turned in were ranged
round three sides of it; on a big day they would form into parallel
lanes and cut the square into sections as well. The produce of all Fox
County filled the wagons, varying agreeably as the year went round.
Bags of potatoes leaned against the sidewalk, apples brimmed in bushel
measures, ducks dropped their twisted necks over the cart wheels; the
town hall, in this play of colour, stood redeemed. The produce was
mostly left to the women to sell. On the fourth side of the square
loads of hay and cordwood demanded the master mind, but small matters of
fruit, vegetables, and poultry submitted to feminine judgement. The men
“unhitched,” and went away on their own business; it was the wives you
accosted, as they sat in the middle, with their knees drawn up and their
skirts tucked close, vigilant in rusty bonnets, if you wished to buy.
Among them circulated the housewives of Elgin, pricing and comparing and
acquiring; you could see it all from Dr Simmons’s window, sitting in
his chair that screwed up and down. There was a little difficulty always
about getting things home; only very ordinary people carried their own
marketing. Trifling articles, like eggs or radishes, might be smuggled
into a brown wicker basket with covers; but it did not consort with
elegance to “trapes” home with anything that looked inconvenient or had
legs sticking out of it. So that arrangements of mutual obligation had
to be made: the good woman from whom Mrs Jones had bought her tomatoes
would take charge of the spring chickens Mrs Jones had bought from
another good woman just as soon as not, and deliver them at Mrs Jones’s
residence, as under any circumstances she was “going round that way.”

It was a scene of activity but not of excitement, or in any sense of
joy. The matter was too hard an importance; it made too much difference
on both sides whether potatoes were twelve or fifteen cents a peck.
The dealers were laconic and the buyers anxious; country neighbours
exchanged the time of day, but under the pressure of affairs. Now and
then a lady of Elgin stopped to gossip with another; the countrywomen
looked on, curious, grim, and a little contemptuous of so much
demonstration and so many words. Life on an Elgin market day was a
serious presentment even when the sun shone, and at times when it rained
or snowed the aesthetic seemed a wholly unjustifiable point of view.
It was not misery, it was even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the
margin was small and the struggle plain. Plain, too, it was that here
was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken ground of dramatic
promise, but a narrow inheritance of the opportunity to live which
generations had grasped before. There were bones in the village
graveyards of Fox County to father all these sharp features; Elgin
market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County and, in little,
the history of the whole Province. The heart of it was there, the
enduring heart of the new country already old in acquiescence. It was
the deep root of the race in the land, twisted and unlovely, but holding
the promise of all. Something like that Lorne Murchison felt about it as
he stood for a moment in the passage I have mentioned and looked across
the road. The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in
gayer spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously equal to
what he had to do, on days when the square was full than on days when
it was empty. This morning he had an elation of his own; it touched
everything with more vivid reality. The familiar picture stirred a joy
in him in tune with his private happiness; its undernote came to him
with a pang as keen. The sense of kinship surged in his heart; these
were his people, this his lot as well as theirs. For the first time he
saw it in detachment. Till now he had regarded it with the friendly eyes
of a participator who looked no further. Today he did look further: the
whole world invited his eyes, offering him a great piece of luck to look
through. The opportunity was in his hand which, if he could seize and
hold, would lift and carry him on. He was as much aware of its potential
significance as anyone could be, and what leapt in his veins till
he could have laughed aloud was the splendid conviction of resource.
Already in the door of the passage he had achieved, from that point he
looked at the scene before him with an impulse of loyalty and devotion.
A tenderness seized him for the farmers of Fox County, a throb of
enthusiasm for the idea they represented, which had become for
him suddenly moving and pictorial. At that moment his country came
subjectively into his possession; great and helpless it came into his
inheritance as it comes into the inheritance of every man who can take
it, by deed of imagination and energy and love. He held this microcosm
of it, as one might say, in his hand and looked at it ardently; then he
took his way across the road.

A tall thickly built young fellow detached himself from a group, smiling
broadly at the sight of Murchison, and started to meet him.

“Hello, Lorne,” he said. He had smiled all the way anticipating the
encounter. He was obviously in clothes which he did not put on every
day, but the seriousness of this was counteracted by his hard felt hat,
which he wore at an angle that disregarded convention.

“Hello, Elmore! You back?”

“That’s about it.”

“You don’t say! Back to stay?”

“Far’s I can see. Young Alf’s made up his mind to learn the dentist
business, and the old folks are backin’ him; so I don’t see but I’ve got
to stop on and run the show. Father’s gettin’ up in years now.”

“Why, yes. I suppose he must be. It’s a good while since you went West.
Well, what sort of a country have they got out Swan River way? Booming
right along?”

“Boom nothing. I don’t mean to say there’s anything the matter with
the country; there ain’t; but you’ve got to get up just as early in
the mornings out there as y’do anywhere, far’s I noticed. An’ it’s a
lonesome life. Now I AM back I don’t know but little old Ontario’s good
enough for me. ‘N I hear you’ve taken up the law, Lorne. Y’always had a
partiality for it, d’y’ remember, up there to the Collegiate? I used to
think it’d be fine to travel with samples, those days. But you were dead
gone on the law. ‘N by all reports it pans out pretty well don’t it?”

The young men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together.
Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him
for the town’s essential stamp, made by contrast, as he threaded the
desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the
formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration. The
values of carriage and of clothes are relative: in Fifth Avenue Lorne
would have looked countrified, in Piccadilly colonial. Districts are
imaginable, perhaps not in this world, where the frequenters of even
those fashionable thoroughfares would attract glances of curiosity
by their failure to achieve the common standard in such things. Lorne
Murchison, to dismiss the matter, was well up to the standard of Elgin,
though he wore his straw hat quite on the back of his head and buried
both hands in his trousers pockets. His eye was full of pleasant easy
familiarity with the things he saw, and ready to see larger things; it
had that beam of active inquiry, curious but never amazed that marks
the man likely to expand his horizons. Meanwhile he was on capital terms
with his little world, which seemed to take pleasure in hailing him by
his Christian name; even morose Jim Webster, who had failed three times
in groceries, said “Morning, Lorne” with a look of toleration. He moved
alertly; the poise of his head was sanguine; the sun shone on him; the
timidest soul came nearer to him. He and Elmore Crow, who walked beside
him, had gone through the lower forms of the Elgin Collegiate Institute
together, that really “public” kind of school which has so much to do
with reassorting the classes of a new country. The Collegiate Institute
took in raw material and turned out teachers, more teachers than
anything. The teachers taught, chiefly in rural districts where they
could save money, and with the money they saved changed themselves into
doctors, Fellows of the University, mining engineers. The Collegiate
Institute was a potential melting-pot: you went in as your simple
opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what
was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same
as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful
a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too
hypothetical; it is not yet a normal force, with an operation to be
reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character
in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that inherited;
it sometimes reveals surprises. Neither Lorne Murchison nor Elmore Crow
illustrates this point very nearly. Lorne would have gone into the law
in any case, since his father was able to send him, and Elmore would
inevitably have gone back to the crops since he was early defeated by
any other possibility. Nevertheless, as they walk together in my mind
along the Elgin market square, the Elgin Collegiate Institute rises
infallibly behind them, a directing influence and a responsible parent.
Lorne was telling his great news.

“You don’t say!” remarked Elmore in response to it. “Lumbago is it? Pa’s
subject to that too; gets an attack most springs. Mr Fulke’ll have to
lay right up--it’s the only thing.”

“I’m afraid he will. And Warner never appeared in court in his life.”

“What d’ye keep Warner for, then?”

“Oh, he does the conveyancing. He’s a good conveyancer, but he isn’t
any pleader and doesn’t pretend to be. And it’s too late to transfer the
case; nobody could get to the bottom of it as we have in the time. So it
falls on me.”

“Caesar, his ghost! How d’ye feel about it, Lorne? I’d be scared green.
Y’don’t TALK nervous. Now I bet you get there with both feet.”

“I hope to get there,” the young lawyer answered; and as he spoke a
concentration came into his face which drove the elation and everything
else that was boyish out of it. “It’s bigger business than I could have
expected for another five years. I’m sorry for the old man, though--HE’S
nervous, if you like. They can hardly keep him in bed. Isn’t that
somebody beckoning to you?”

Elmore looked everywhere except in the right direction among the carts.
If you had been “to the Collegiate,” relatives among the carts selling
squashes were embarrassing.

“There,” his companion indicated.

“It’s Mother,” replied Mr Crow, with elaborate unconcern; “but I don’t
suppose she’s in anything of a hurry. I’ll just go along with you far’s
the post-office.” He kept his glance carefully from the spot at which
he was signalled, and a hint of copper colour crawled up the back of his
neck.

“Oh, but she is. Come along, Elmore; I can go that way.”

“It’ll be longer for you.”

“Not a bit.” Lorne cast a shrewd glance at his companion. “And as we’re
passing, you might just introduce me to your mother; see?”

“She won’t expect it, Lorne.”

“That’s all right, my son. She won’t refuse to meet a friend of yours.”
 He led the way as he spoke to the point of vantage occupied by Mrs Crow,
followed, with plain reluctance, by her son. She was a frail-looking
old woman, with a knitted shawl pinned tightly across her chest, and her
bonnet, in the course of commercial activity, pushed so far back as to
be almost falling off.

“You might smarten yourself with that change, Elmore,” she addressed
him, ignoring his companion. “There’s folks coming back for it.
Two-dollar bill, wa’n’t it? Fifty cents--seventy-five--dollar’n a half.
That’s a Yankee dime, an’ you kin march straight back with it. They
don’t pass but for nine cents, as you’re old enough to know. Keep
twenty-five cents for your dinner--you’ll get most for the money at the
Barker House--an’ bring me back another quarter. Better go an’ get your
victuals now--it’s gone twelve--while they’re hot.”

Elmore took his instructions without visible demur; and then, as
Lorne had not seen fit to detach himself, performed the ceremony
of introduction. As he performed it he drew one foot back and bowed
himself, which seemed obscurely to facilitate it. The suspicion faded
out of Mrs Crow’s tired old sharp eyes under the formula, and she said
she was pleased to make our friend’s acquaintance.

“Mr Murchison’s changed some since the old days at the Collegiate,”
 Elmore explained, “but he ain’t any different under his coat. He’s
practisin’ the law.”

“Lawyers,” Mrs Crow observed, “are folks I like to keep away from.”

“Quite right, too,” responded Lorne, unabashed. “And so you’ve got my
friend here back on the farm, Mrs Crow?”

“Well, yes, he’s back on the farm, an’ when he’s wore out his Winnipeg
clothes and his big ideas, we’re lookin’ to make him some use.” Mrs
Crow’s intention, though barbed, was humorous, and her son grinned
broadly.

“There’s more money in the law,” he remarked “once you get a start.
Here’s Mr Murchison goin’ to run the Ormiston case; his old man’s down
sick, an’ I guess it depends on Lorne now whether Ormiston gets off or
goes to penitentiary.”

Mrs Crow’s face tied itself up into criticism as she looked our young
man up and down. “Depends upon you, does it?” she commented. “Well, all
I’ve got to say is it’s a mighty young dependence. Coming on next
week, ain’t it? You won’t be much older by then. Yes’m,” she turned to
business, “I don’t say but what it’s high for rhubarb, but there ain’t
another bunch in the market, and won’t be for a week yet.”

Under cover of this discussion Lorne bade the Crows good morning,
retreating in the rear of the lady who found the rhubarb high. Mrs
Crow’s drop of acid combined with his saving sense of the humour of it
to adjust all his courage and his confidence, and with a braver face
than ever he involuntarily hastened his steps to keep pace with his
happy chance.




CHAPTER X

In the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing to bound a local
excitement, or to impede its transmission at full value. Elgin was a
manufacturing town in southern Ontario, but they would have known every
development of the Federal Bank case at the North Pole if there had been
anybody there to learn. In Halifax they did know it, and in Vancouver,
B.C., while every hundred miles nearer it warmed as a topic in
proportion. In Montreal the papers gave it headlines; from Toronto they
sent special reporters. Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of
Mr Horace Williams, of the Elgin Express, and of Rawlins, who held all
the cards in their hands, and played them, it must be said, admirably,
reducing the Mercury to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which
the Express would invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the
following day. It was to the Express that the Toronto reporters came for
details and local colour; and Mr Williams gave them just as much as he
thought they ought to have and no more. It was the Express that managed,
while elaborately abstaining from improper comment upon a matter sub
judice, to feed and support the general conviction of young Ormiston’s
innocence, and thereby win for itself, though a “Grit” paper, wide
reading in that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation, while the
Conservative Mercury, with its reckless sympathy for an old party name,
made itself criminally liable by reviewing cases of hard dealing by
the bank among the farmers, and only escaped prosecution by the amplest
retraction and the most contrite apology. As Mr Williams remarked, there
was no use in dwelling on the unpopularity of the bank, that didn’t need
pointing out; folks down Moneida way could put any newspaper wise on the
number of mortgages foreclosed and the rate for secondary loans exacted
by the bank in those parts. That consideration, no doubt, human nature
being what it is, contributed the active principle to the feeling so
widely aroused by the case. We are not very readily the prey to
emotions of faith in our fellows, especially, perhaps, if we live under
conditions somewhat hard and narrow; the greater animosity behind is,
at all events, valuable to give force and relief and staying power to
a sentiment of generous conviction. But however we may depreciate its
origin, the conviction was there, widespread in the townships: young
Ormiston would “get clear”; the case for the defence might be heard over
every bushel of oats in Elgin market-place.

In Elgin itself opinion was more reserved. There was a general view
that these bank clerks were fast fellows, and a tendency to contrast the
habits and the pay of such dashing young men, an exercise which ended
in a not unnatural query. As to the irritating caste feeling maintained
among them, young Ormiston perhaps gave himself as few airs as any.
He was generally conceded indeed by the judging sex to be “nice to
everybody”; but was not that exactly the nature for which temptations
were most easily spread? The town, moreover, had a sapience of its own.
Was it likely that the bank would bring a case so publicly involving its
character and management without knowing pretty well what it was about?
The town would not be committed beyond the circle of young Ormiston’s
intimate friends, which was naturally small if you compared it with the
public; the town wasn’t going to be surprised at anything that might be
proved. On the other hand, the town was much more vividly touched than
the country by the accident which had made Lorne Murchison practically
sole counsel for the defence, announced as it was by the Express with
every appreciation of its dramatic value. Among what the Express called
“the farming community” this, in so far as it had penetrated, was
regarded as a simple misfortune, a dull blow to expectancy, which
expectancy had some work to survive. Elgin, with its finer palate for
sensation, saw in it heightened chances, both for Lorne and for the
case; and if any ratepayer within its limits had remained indifferent to
the suit, the fact that one side of it had been confided to so young and
so “smart” a fellow townsman would have been bound to draw him into the
circle of speculation. Youth in a young country is a symbol wearing
all its value. It stands not only for what it is. The trick of augury
invests it, at a glance, with the sum of its possibilities, the augurs
all sincere, confident, and exulting. They have been justified so often;
they know, in their wide fair fields of opportunity, just what qualities
will produce what results. There is thus a complacence among adolescent
peoples which is vaguely irritating to their elders; but the greybeards
need not be over-captious; it is only a question of time, pathetically
short-lived in the history of the race. Sanguine persons in Elgin were
freely disposed to “bet on” Lorne Murchison, and there were none
so despondent as to take the view that he would not come out of it,
somehow; with an added personal significance. To make a spoon is a
laudable achievement, but it may be no mean business to spoil a horn.

As the Express put it, there was as little standing room for ladies and
gentlemen in the courthouse the first day of the Spring Assizes as there
was for horses in the Court House Square. The County Crown Attorney
was unusually, oddly, reinforced by Cruickshank, of Toronto--the great
Cruickshank, K.C., probably the most distinguished criminal lawyer in
the Province. There were those who considered that Cruickshank should
not have been brought down, that it argued undue influence on the
part of the bank, and his retainer was a fierce fan to the feeling in
Moneida; but there is no doubt that his appearance added all that was
possible to the universal interest in the case. Henry Cruickshank was an
able man and, what was rarer a fastidious politician. He had held office
in the Dominion Cabinet, and had resigned it because of a difference
with his colleagues in the application of a principle; they called him,
after a British politician of lofty but abortive views, the Canadian
Renfaire. He had that independence of personality, that intellectual
candour, and that touch of magnetism which combine to make a man
interesting in his public relations. Cruickshank’s name alone would have
filled the courthouse, and people would have gone away quoting him.

From the first word of the case for the prosecution there was that in
the leading counsel’s manner--a gravity, a kindness, an inclination to
neglect the commoner methods of scoring--that suggested, with the sudden
chill of unexpectedly bad news, a foregone conclusion. The reality of
his feeling reference to the painful position of the defendant’s father,
the sincerity of his regret on behalf of the bank, for the deplorable
exigency under which proceedings had been instituted, spread a kind of
blankness through the court; men frowned thoughtfully, and one or two
ladies shed furtive tears. Even the counsel for the defence, it was
afterward remembered, looked grave, sympathetic, and concerned, in
response to the brief but significant and moving sentences with which
his eminent opponent opened the case. It is not my duty to report the
trial for any newspaper; I will therefore spare myself more than the
most general references; but the facts undoubtedly were that a safe in
the strong room of the bank had been opened between certain hours on a
certain night and its contents abstracted; that young Ormiston, cashier
of the bank, was sleeping, or supposed to be sleeping, upon the premises
at this time, during the illness of the junior whose usual duty it was;
and that the Crown was in possession of certain evidence which would be
brought forward to prove collusion with the burglary on the part of
the defendant, collusion to cover deficits for which he could be held
responsible. In a strain almost apologetic, Mr Cruickshank explained
to the jury the circumstances which led the directors to the suspicion
which they now believed only too regrettably well founded. These
consisted in the fact that the young man was known to be living beyond
his means, and so to be constantly visited by the temptation to such
a crime; the special facilities which he controlled for its commission
and, in particular, the ease and confidence with which the actual
operation had been carried out, arguing no fear of detection on the
part of the burglars, no danger of interference from one who should have
stood ready to defend with his life the property in his charge, but who
would shortly be seen to have been toward it, first, a plunderer in his
own person, and afterward the accomplice of plunderers to conceal
his guilt. Examination showed the safe to have been opened with the
dexterity that demands both time and coolness; and the ash from a pipe
knocked out against the wall at the side of the passage offered ironical
testimony to the comfort in which the business had been done.

The lawyer gave these considerations their full weight, and it was
in dramatic contrast with the last of them that he produced the first
significant fragment of evidence against Ormiston. There had been, after
all, some hurry of departure. It was shown by a sheet of paper bearing
the mark of a dirty thumb and a hasty boot-heel, bearing also the
combination formula for opening the safe.

The public was familiar with that piece of evidence; it had gone
through every kind of mill of opinion; it made no special sensation. The
evidence of the caretaker who found the formula and of the witnesses who
established it to be in young Ormiston’s handwriting, produced little
interest. Mr Cruickshank, in elaborating his theory as to why with the
formula in their hands the depredators still found it necessary to pick
the lock, offered nothing to speculations already current--the duplicate
key with which they had doubtless been enabled to supply themselves
was a clumsy copy and had failed them; that conclusion had been drawn
commonly enough. The next scrap of paper produced by the prosecution was
another matter. It was the mere torn end of a greasy sheet; upon it was
written “Not less than 3,000 net,” and it had been found in the turning
out of Ormiston’s dressing-table. It might have been anything--a number
of people pursed their lips contemptuously--or it might have been,
without doubt, the fragment of a disreputable transaction that the
prosecuting counsel endeavoured to show it. Here, no doubt, was one of
the pieces of evidence the prosecution was understood to have up its
sleeve, and that portion of the prosecuting counsel’s garment was
watched with feverish interest for further disclosures. They came
rapidly enough, but we must hurry them even more. The name of Miss
Florence Belton, when it rose to the surface of the evidence, riveted
every eye and ear. Miss Belton was one of those ambiguous ladies who
sometimes drift out from the metropolitan vortex and circle restfully in
backwaters for varying periods, appearing and disappearing irrelevantly.
They dress beautifully; they are known to “paint” and thought to dye
their hair. They establish no relations, being much too preoccupied.
making exceptions only, as a rule, in favour of one or two young men, to
whom they extend amenities based--it is the common talk--upon late
hours and whiskey-and-soda. They seem superior to the little prevailing
conventions; they excite an unlawful interest; though nobody knows them
black nobody imagines them white; and when they appear upon Main Street
in search of shoelaces or elastic heads are turned and nods, possibly
nudges, exchanged. Miss Belton had come from New York to the Barker
House, Elgin, and young Ormiston’s intimacy with her was one of the
things that counted against him in the general view. It was to so count
more seriously in the particular instance. Witnesses were called to
prove that he had spent the evening of the burglary with Miss Belton at
her hotel, that he had remained with her until one o’clock, that he was
in the habit of spending his evenings with Miss Belton.

Rawlins of the Express did not overdo the sensation which was caused in
the courtroom when the name of this lady herself was called to summon
her to the witness box. It was indeed the despair of his whole career.
He thought despondingly ever after of the thrill, to which he himself
was not superior and which, if he had only been able to handle it
adequately, might have led him straight up the ladder to a night
editorship. Miss Belton appeared from some unsuspected seat near the
door, throwing back a heavy veil, and walking as austerely as she could,
considering the colour of her hair. She took her place without emotion
and there she corroborated the evidence of the servants of the hotel.
To the grave questions of the prosecution she fluently replied that the
distraction of these evenings had been cards--cards played, certainly,
for money, and that she, certainly, had won very considerable sums from
the defendant from time to time. In Elgin the very mention of cards
played for money will cause a hush of something deeper than disapproval;
there was silence in the court at this. In producing several banknotes
for Miss Belton’s identification, Mr Cruickshank seemed to profit by the
silence. Miss Belton identified them without hesitation, as she might
easily, since they had been traced to her possession. Asked to account
for them; she stated, without winking, that they had been paid to her by
Mr Walter Ormiston at various times during the fortnight preceding the
burglary, in satisfaction of debts at cards. She, Miss Belton, had left
Elgin for Chicago the day after the burglary. Mr Ormiston knew that she
was going. He had paid her the four fifty-dollar notes actually traced,
the night before she left, and said. “You won’t need to break these
here, will you?” He seemed anxious that she should not, but it was
the merest accident that she hadn’t. In all, she had received from Mr
Ormiston four hundred and fifty dollars. No, she had no suspicion that
the young man might not be in a position to make such payments. She
understood that Mr Ormiston’s family was wealthy, and never thought
twice about it.

She spoke with a hard dignity, the lady, and a great effect of doing
business, a kind of assertion of the legitimate. The farmers of Fox
County told each other in chapfallen appreciation that she was about as
level-headed as they make them. Lawyer Cruickshank, as they called him,
brought forth from her detail after detail, and every detail fitted
damningly with the last. The effect upon young Ormiston was so painful
that many looked another way. His jaw was set and his features
contorted to hold himself from the disgrace of tears. He was generally
acknowledged to be overwhelmed by the unexpected demonstration of his
guilt, but distress was so plain in him that there was not a soul in
the place that was not sorry for him. In one or two resolute faces hope
still glimmered, but it hardly survived the cross-examination of the
Crown’s chief witness by the counsel for the defence which, as far as
it went, had a perfunctory air and contributed little to the evidence
before the Court. It did not go all the way, however. The case having
opened late, the defence was reserved till the following day, when
proceedings would be resumed with the further cross-examination of Miss
Belton.

As the defendant’s counsel went down the courthouse steps Rawlins came
up to him to take note of his demeanour and anything else that might be
going.

“Pretty stiff row to hoe you’ve got there, Lorne,” he said.

“Pretty stiff,” responded Lorne.




CHAPTER XI

Imagination, one gathers, is a quality dispensed with of necessity in
the practice of most professions, being that of which nature is, for
some reason, most niggardly. There is no such thing as passing in
imagination for any department of public usefulness, even the government
of Oriental races; the list of the known qualified would be exhausted,
perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher
enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must;
it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have
hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was
indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client’s
situation, the view which came to him and stayed with him like a chapter
in a novel, from the hour in which Ormiston had reluctantly accounted
for himself upon the night of the burglary. It was a brilliant view,
that perceived the young clerk the victim of the conspiracy he was
charged with furthering; its justification lay back, dimly, among the
intuitions about human nature which are part of the attribute I
have quoted. I may shortly say that it was justified; another day’s
attendance at the Elgin Courthouse shall not be compulsory here,
whatever it may have been there. Young Ormiston’s commercial probity
is really no special concern of ours; the thing which does matter, and
considerably, is the special quality which Lorne Murchison brought to
the task of its vindication, the quality that made new and striking
appeal, through every channel of the great occasion, to those who heard
him. It was that which reinforced and comforted every friend Ormiston
had in the courtroom, before Lorne proceeded either to deal with the
evidence of the other side, or to produce any jot or tittle of his own;
and it was that which affected his distinguished opponent to the special
interest which afterward showed itself so pleasantly superior to the
sting of defeat. The fact that the defence was quite as extraordinarily
indebted to circumstantial evidence as the prosecution in no way
detracted from the character of Lorne’s personal triumph; rather,
indeed, in the popular view and Rawlins’s, enhanced it. There was in
it the primitive joy of seeing a ruffian knocked down with his own
illegitimate weapons, from the moment the dropped formula was proved to
be an old superseded one, and unexpected indication was produced that
Ormiston’s room, as well as the bank vault, had been entered the night
of the robbery, to the more glorious excitement of establishing Miss
Belton’s connection--not to be quoted--with a cracksman at that moment
being diligently inquired for by the New York police with reference to
a dramatically bigger matter. You saw the plot at once as he constructed
it; the pipe ash became explicable in the seduction of Miss Belton’s
charms. The cunning net unwove itself, delicately and deliberately, to
tangle round the lady. There was in it that superiority in the art of
legerdemain, of mere calm, astonishing manipulation, so applauded in
regions where romance has not yet been quite trampled down by reason.
Lorne scored; he scored in face of probability, expectation, fact; it
was the very climax and coruscation of score. He scored not only by the
cards he held but by the beautiful way he played them, if one may say
so. His nature came into this, his gravity and gentleness, his sympathy,
his young angry irony. To mention just one thing, there was the way he
held Miss Belton up, after the exposure of her arts, as the lady for
whom his client had so chivalric a regard that he had for some time
refused to state his whereabouts at the hour the bank was entered in
the fear of compromising her. For this, no doubt, his client could have
strangled him, but it operated, of course, to raise the poor fellow
in the estimation of every body, with the possible exception of his
employers. When, after the unmistakable summing-up, the foreman returned
in a quarter of an hour with the verdict of “Not guilty,” people
noticed that the young man walked out of court behind his father with
as drooping a head as if he had gone under sentence; so much so that
by common consent he was allowed to slip quietly away. Miss Belton
departed, followed by the detective, whose services were promptly
transferred to the prosecution, and by a proportion of those who scented
further entertainment in her perfumed, perjured wake. But the majority
hung back, leaving their places slowly; it was Lorne the crowd wanted
to shake hands with to say just a word of congratulation to, Lorne’s
triumph that they desired to enhance by a hearty sentence, or at least
an admiring glance. Walter Winter was among the most genial.

“Young man,” he said, “what did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you you ought
to take this case?” Mr Winter, with his chest thrust out, plumed and
strutted in justifiable pride of prophecy. “Now, I’ll tell you another
thing: today’s event will do more for you than it has for Ormiston. Mark
my words!”

They were all of that opinion, all the fine foretellers of the profit
Lorne should draw from his spirited and conspicuous success; they
stood about in knots discussing it; to some extent it eclipsed the main
interest and issue of the day, at that moment driving out, free and
disconsolate, between the snake fences of the South Riding to Moneida
Reservation. The quick and friendly sense of opportunity was abroad on
Lorne Murchison’s behalf; friends and neighbours and Dr Drummond, and
people who hardly knew the fellow, exchanged wise words about what his
chance would do for him. What it would immediately do was present to
nobody so clearly, however, as to Mr Henry Cruickshank, who decided that
he would, after all, accept Dr Drummond’s invitation to spend the night
with him, and find out the little he didn’t know already about this
young man.

That evening the Murchisons’ doorbell rang twice. The first time it was
to admit the Rev. Hugh Finlay, who had come to return Sordello, which he
had borrowed from Advena, and to find out whether she thought with him
about the interpretation of certain passages, and if not--there was
always the possibility--wherein their divergence lay. The second time
the door opened to Dr Drummond and Mr Cruickshank; and the electric
light had to be turned on in the drawing-room, since the library was
already occupied by Mr Finlay and Advena, Mr and Mrs Murchison never
having got over their early habit of sitting in the dining-room after
tea. Even then Mrs Murchison had to put away her workbasket, and John
Murchison to knock the ashes out of his pipe, looking at one another
with surprised inquiry when Eliza informed them of their visitors.
Luckily, Mr Lorne was also in, and Eliza was sent to tell him, and
Mr Lorne came down the stairs two at a time to join the party in the
drawing-room, which was presently supplied by Eliza with a dignified
service of cake and wine. The hall divided that room from the library,
and both doors were shut. We cannot hesitate about which to open; we
have only, indeed, to follow the recognized tradition of Elgin, which
would never have entered the library. No vivid conclusion should be
drawn, no serious situation may even be indicated. It would simply have
been considered, in Elgin, stupid to go into the library.

“It isn’t a case for the High Commissioner for Canada,” Mr Cruickshank
was saying. “It’s a case for direct representation of the interests
concerned, and their view of the effect upon trade. That’s the only
voice to speak with if you want to get anything done. Conviction carries
conviction. The High Commissioner is a very useful fellow to live
in London and look after the ornamental, the sentimental, and
immigration--nobody could do it better than Selkirk. And in England, of
course, they like that kind of agency. It’s the good old dignified
way; but it won’t do for everything. You don’t find our friend Morgan
operating through the American equivalent of a High Commissioner.”

“No, you don’t,” said John Murchison.

“He goes over there as a principal, and the British Government, if he
wants to deal with it, is only another principal. That’s the way our
deputation will go. We’re practically all shippers, though of course the
matter of tenders will come later. There is big business for them here,
national business, and we propose to show it. The subsidy we want will
come back to the country four times over in two years. Freights from
Boston alone--”

“It’s the patriotic, imperial argument you’ll have to press, I doubt,”
 said John Murchison. “They’re not business people over there--the men in
office are not. How should they be? The system draws them from the
wrong class. They’re gentlemen--noblemen, maybe--first, and they’ve no
practical education. There’s only one way of getting it, and that’s to
make your own living. How many of them have ever made tuppence? There’s
where the Americans beat them so badly--they’ve got the sixth sense,
the business sense. No; you’ll not find them responding greatly to what
there is in it for trade--they’d like to well enough, but they just
won’t see it; and, by George! what a fine suspicion they’ll have of ye!
As to freights from Boston,” he continued, as they all laughed, “I’m
of opinion you’d better not mention them. What! steal the trade of a
friendly power! Tut, tut!”

It was a long speech for John Murchison, but they were all excited to a
pitch beyond the usual. Henry Cruickshank had brought with him an
event of extraordinary importance. It seemed to sit there with him,
significant and propitious, in the middle of the sofa; they all looked
at it in the pauses. Dr Drummond, lost in an armchair, alternately
contemplated it and remembered to assert himself part of it. As head of
a deputation from the United Chambers of Commerce of Canada shortly
to wait on the British Government to press for the encouragement of
improved communications within the Empire, Cruickshank had been asked
to select a secretary. The appointment, in view of the desirability,
for political reasons, of giving the widest publicity to the hopes
and motives of the deputation, was an important one. The action of the
Canadian Government, in extending conditional promises of support, had
to be justified to the Canadian taxpayer; and that shy and weary person
whose shoulders uphold the greatness of Britain, had also to receive
such conciliation and reassurance as it was possible to administer to
him, by way of nerving the administrative arm over there to an act of
enterprise. Mr Cruickshank had had two or three young fellows, mostly
newspaper men, in his mind’s eye; but when Lorne came into his literal
range of vision, the others had promptly been retired in our friend’s
favour. Young Mr Murchison, he had concluded, was the man they wanted;
and if his office could spare him, it would probably do young Mr
Murchison no harm in any sort of way to accompany the deputation to
London and throw himself into the matter the deputation had at heart.

“But it’s the Empire!” said Lorne, with a sort of shy fire, when Mr
Cruickshank enunciated this.

We need not, perhaps, dwell upon the significance of his agreement. It
was then not long since the maple leaf had been stained brighter than
ever, not without honour, to maintain the word that fell from him. The
three older men looked at him kindly; John Murchison, rubbing his chin
as he considered the situation, slightly shook his head. One took it
that in his view the Empire was not so readily envisaged.

“That has a strong bearing,” Mr Cruickshank assented.

“It’s the whole case--it seems to me,” repeated young Murchison.

“It should help to knit us up,” said Dr Drummond. “I’ll put my name down
on the first passenger list, if Knox Church will let me off. See that
you have special rates,” he added, with a twinkle, “for ministers and
missionaries.”

“And only ten days to get him ready in,” said Mrs Murchison. “It will
take some seeing to, I assure you; and I don’t know how it’s to be done
in the time. For once, Lorne, I’ll have to order you ready-made shirts,
and you’ll just have to put up with it. Nothing else could possibly get
back from the wash.”

“I’ll put up with it, Mother.”

They went into other details of Lorne’s equipment while Mrs Murchison’s
eye still wandered over the necessities of his wardrobe. They arranged
the date on which he was to meet the members of the deputation in
Montreal, and Mr Cruickshank promised to send him all available
documents and such presentation of the project as had been made in the
newspapers.

“You shall be put in immediate possession of the bones of the thing,”
 he said, “but what really matters,” he added pleasantly, “I think you’ve
got already.”

It took, of course, some discussion, and it was quite ten o’clock before
everything was gone into, and the prospect was clear to them all. As
they emerged into the hall together, the door of the room opposite also
opened, and the Rev. Hugh Finlay found himself added to their group.
They all made the best of the unexpected encounter. It was rather an
elaborate best, very polite and entirely grave, except in the instance
of Dr Drummond, who met his subaltern with a smile in which cordiality
struggled in vain to overcome the delighted humour.




CHAPTER XII

It was the talk of the town, the pride of the market-place, Lorne
Murchison’s having been selected to accompany what was known as the
Cruickshank deputation to England. The general spirit of congratulation
was corrected by a tendency to assert it another proof of sagacity on
the chairman’s part; Elgin wouldn’t be too flattered; Lawyer Cruickshank
couldn’t have done better. You may be sure the Express was well
ahead with it. “Honour to Our Young Fellow Townsman. A Well-Merited
Compliment,” and Rawlins was round promptly next morning to glean
further particulars. He found only Mrs Murchison, on a stepladder tying
up the clematis that climbed about the verandah, and she told him a
little about clematis and a good deal about the inconvenience of having
to abandon superintending the spring cleaning in order to get Lorne
ready to go to the Old Country at such short notice, but nothing he
could put in the paper. Lorne, sought at the office, was hardly more
communicative. Mr Williams himself dropped in there. He said the Express
would now have a personal interest in the object of the deputation, and
proposed to strike out a broad line, a broader line than ever.

“We’ve got into the way of taking it for granted,” said Mr Williams,
“that the subsidy idea is a kind of mediaeval idea. Raise a big enough
shout and you get things taken for granted in economics for a long
while. Conditions keep changing, right along, all the time, and
presently you’ve got to reconsider. There ain’t any sort of ultimate
truth in the finest economic position, my son; not any at all.”

“We’ll subsidize over here, right enough,” said Lorne.

“That’s the idea--that’s the prevailing idea, just now. But lots of
people think different--more than you’d imagine. I was talking to
old man Milburn just now--he’s dead against it. ‘Government has no
business,’ he said, ‘to apply the taxes in the interests of any company.
It oughtn’t to know how to spell “subsidy.” If the trade was there it
would get itself carried,’ he said.”

“Well, that surprises me,” said Lorne.

“Surprised me, too. But I was on the spot with him; just thought of it
in time. ‘Well, now, Mr Milburn,’ I said, ‘you’ve changed your mind.
Thought that was a thing you Conservatives never did,’ I said. ‘We
don’t--I haven’t,’ he said. ‘What d’ye mean? Twenty-five years ago,’ I
said, ‘when you were considering whether you’d start the Milburn Boiler
Works here or in Hamilton, Hamilton offered you a free site, and Elgin
offered you a free site and a dam for your water power. You took the
biggest subsidy an’ came here,’ I said.”

Lorne laughed: “What did he say to that?”

“Hadn’t a word. ‘I guess it’s up to me,’ he said. Then he turned round
and came back. ‘Hold on, Williams; he said. ‘You know so much already
about my boiler works, it wouldn’t be much trouble for you to write out
an account of them from the beginning, would it? Working in the last
quarter of a century of the town’s progress, you know, and all that.
Come round to the office tomorrow, and I’ll give you some pointers.’ And
he fixed up a two-column ad right away. He was afraid I’d round on him,
I suppose, if I caught him saying anything more about the immorality of
subsidies.”

“He won’t say anything more.”

“Probably not. Milburn hasn’t got much of a political conscience, but
he’s got a sense of what’s silly. Well, now, I expect you want all the
time there is.”

Mr Williams removed himself from the edge of the table, which was strewn
with maps and bluebooks, printed official, and typewritten demi-official
papers.

“Give ‘em a notion of those Assiniboian wheat acres, my boy, and the
ranch country we’ve got; tell ‘em about the future of quick passage and
cold storage. Get ‘em a little ashamed to have made so many fortunes for
Yankee beef combines; persuade ‘em the cheapest market has a funny way
of getting the dearest price in the end. Give it ‘em, Lorne, hot and
cold and fricasseed. The Express will back you up.”

He slapped his young friend’s shoulder, who seemed occupied with
matters that prevented his at once feeling the value of this assurance.
“Bye-bye,” said Mr Williams. “See you again before you start.”

“Oh, of course!” Lorne replied. “I’ll--I’ll come round. By the
way, Williams, Mr Milburn didn’t say anything--anything about me in
connection with this business? Didn’t mention, I suppose, what he
thought about my going?”

“Not a word, my boy! He was away up in abstract principles; he generally
is. Bye-bye.”

“It’s gone to his head a little bit--only natural,” Horace reflected as
he went down the stairs. “He’s probably just feeding on what folks think
of it. As if it mattered a pin’s head what Octavius Milburn thinks or
don’t think!”

Lorne, however, left alone with his customs returns and his immigration
reports, sat still, attaching a weight quite out of comparison with a
pin’s head to Mr Milburn’s opinion. He turned it over and over, instead
of the tabulated figures that were his business: he had to show himself
his way to the conclusion that such a thing could not matter seriously
in the end, since Milburn hadn’t a dollar involved--it would be
different if he were a shareholder in the Maple Line. He wished
heartily, nevertheless, that he could demonstrate a special advantage
to boiler-makers in competitive freights with New York. What did they
import, confound them! Pig-iron? Plates and rivets? Fortunately he was
in a position to get at the facts, and he got at them with an interest
of even greater intensity than he had shown to the whole question since
ten that morning. Even now, the unprejudiced observer, turning up the
literature connected with the Cruickshank deputation, may notice a
stress laid upon the advantages to Canadian importers of ore in certain
stages of manufacture which may strike him as slightly, very slightly,
special. Of course there are a good many of them in the country. So
that Mr Horace Williams was justified to some extent in his kindly
observation upon the excusable egotism of youth. Two or three letters,
however, came in while Lorne was considering the relation of plates and
rivets to the objects of his deputation. They were all congratulatory;
one was from the chairman of the Liberal Association at its headquarters
in Toronto. Lorne glanced at them and stowed them away in his pocket.
He would read them when he got home, when it would be a pleasure to hand
them over to his mother. She was making a collection of them.

He had a happy perception that same evening that Mr Milburn’s position
was not, after all, finally and invincibly taken against the deputation
and everything--everybody--concerned with it. He met that gentleman at
his own garden gate. Octavius paused in his exit, to hold it open for
young Murchison, thus even assisting the act of entry, a thing which
thrilled Lorne sweetly enough when he had time to ponder its possible
significance. Alas! the significance that lovers find! Lorne read a
world in the behaviour of Dora’s father in holding the gate open. He
saw political principle put aside in his favour, and social position
forgotten in kindness to him. He saw the gravest, sincerest appreciation
of his recent success, which he took as humbly as a dog will take a
bone; he read a fatherly thought at which his pulses bounded in an
arrogance of triumph, and his heart rose to ask its trust. And Octavius
Milburn had held the gate open because it was more convenient to hold
it open than to leave it open. He had not a political view in the world
that was calculated to affect his attitude toward a practical matter;
and his opinion of Lorne was quite uncomplicated: he thought him a very
likely young fellow. Milburn himself, in the Elgin way, preferred to
see no great significance of this sort anywhere. Young people were
young people; it was natural enough that they should like each other’s
society. They, the Milburns, were very glad to see Mr Murchison, very
glad indeed. It was frequent matter for veiled humorous reference at
the table that he had been to call again, at which Dora would look very
stiff and dignified, and have to be coaxed back into the conversation.
As to anything serious, there was no hurry; plenty of time to think of
that. Such matters dwelt under the horizon; there was no need to scan
them closely; and Mr Milburn went his way, conscious of nothing more
than a comfortable gratification that Dora, so far as the young men were
concerned, seemed as popular as other girls.

Dora was not in the drawing-room. Young ladies in Elgin had always to
be summoned from somewhere. For all the Filkin instinct for the
conservation of polite tradition, Dora was probably reading the
Toronto society weekly--illustrated, with correspondents all over the
Province--on the back verandah and, but for the irruption of a visitor,
would probably not have entered the formal apartment of the house at
all that evening. Drawing-rooms in Elgin had their prescribed uses--to
receive in, to practise in, and for the last sad entertainment of the
dead, when the furniture was disarranged to accommodate the trestles;
but the common business of life went on outside them, even among
prosperous people, the survival, perhaps, of a habit based upon thrift.
The shutters were opened when Lorne entered, to let in the spring
twilight, and the servant pulled a chair into its proper relation with
the room as she went out.

Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin both came in before Dora did. Lorne found
their conversation enchanting, though it was mostly about the difficulty
of keeping the lawn tidy; they had had so much rain. Mrs Milburn assured
him kindly that there was not such another lawn as his father’s in
Elgin. How Mr Murchison managed to have it looking so nice always she
could not think. Only yesterday she and Mr Milburn had stopped to admire
it as they passed.

“Spring is always a beautiful time in Elgin,” she remarked. “There are
so many pretty houses here, each standing in its own grounds. Nothing
very grand, as I tell my friend, Miss Cham, from Buffalo where the
residences are, of course, on quite a different scale; but grandeur
isn’t everything, is it?”

“No, indeed,” said Lorne.

“But you will be leaving for Great Britain very soon now, Mr Murchison,”
 said Miss Filkin. “Leaving Elgin and all its beauties! And I dare say
you won’t think of them once again till you get back!”

“I hope I shall not be so b

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