The Imperialist (15 page)

Mrs. Murchison readjusted her glasses, and turned another row of the tiny sock. “I must say it’s a pleasure to have the lawn neat and green,” she said, with a sigh. “Never did I expect to see the day it would be anything but chickweed and dandelions. We’ve a great deal to be thankful for, and all our children spared to us, too. John,” she continued, casting a shrewd glance over her needles at nothing in particular; “do you suppose anything was settled between Lorne and Dora Milburn before he started?”

“He said nothing to me about it.”

“Oh, well, very likely he wouldn’t. Young people keep such a tremendous lot to themselves nowadays. But it’s my belief they’ve come to an understanding.”

“Dora might do worse,” said John Murchison, judicially.

“I should think Dora might do worse! I don’t know where she’s going to do better! The most promising young man in Elgin, well brought up, well educated, well started in a profession! There’s not a young fellow in this town to compare with Lorne, and perfectly well you know it, John. Might do worse! But that’s you all over. Belittle your own belongings!”

Mr. Murchison smiled in amused tolerance. “They’ve always got you to blow their trumpet, mother,” he replied.

“And more than me. You ought to hear Dr. Drummond about Lorne! He says that if the English Government starts that line of boats to Halifax the country will owe it to him, much more than to Cruickshank, or anybody else.”

“Lorne’s keeping his end up all right,” remarked Stella, jumping off her bicycle in time to hear what her mother said.
“It’s great, that old Wallingham asking him to dinner. And haven’t I just been spreading it!”

“Where have you been, Stella?” asked Mrs. Murchison.

“Oh, only over to the Milburns’. Dora asked me to come and show her the new flower-stitch for table-centres. Dora’s suddenly taken to fancy work. She’s started a lot – a lot too much!” Stella added gloomily.

“If Dora likes to do fancy work I don’t see why anybody should want to stop her,” remarked Mrs. Murchison, with a meaning glance at her husband.

“I suppose she thinks she’s going to get Lorne,” said Stella. Her resentment was only half serious, but the note was there.

“What put that into your head?” asked her mother.

“Oh, well, anybody can see that he’s devoted to her, and has been for ages, and it isn’t as if Lorne was one to
have
girl friends; she’s absolutely the only thing he’s ever looked at twice. She hasn’t got a ring, that’s true, but it would be just like her to want him to get it in England. And I know they correspond. She doesn’t make any secret of it.”

“Oh, I dare say! Other people have eyes in their head as well as you, Stella,” said Mrs. Murchison, stooping for her ball. “But there’s no need to take things for granted at such a rate. And, above all, you’re not to go
talking
, remember!”

“Well, if you think Dora Milburn’s good enough,” returned Lorne’s youngest sister in threatening accents, “it’s more than I do, that’s all. Hello, Miss Murchison!” she continued, as Advena appeared. “You’re looking ’xtremely dinky-dink. Expecting his reverence?”

Advena made no further reply than a look of scornful amusement, which Stella, bicycling forth again, received in the back of her head.

“Father,” said Mrs. Murchison, “if you had taken any share in the bringing up of this family, Stella ought to have her ears boxed this minute!”

“We’ll have to box them,” said Mr. Murchison, “when she comes back.” Advena had retreated into the house. “Is she expecting his reverence?” asked her father with a twinkle.

“Don’t ask me! I’m sure it’s more than I can tell you. It’s a mystery to me, that matter, altogether. I’ve known him come three evenings in a week and not again for a month of Sundays. And when he does come there they sit, talking about their books and their authors; you’d think the world had nothing else in it! I know, for I’ve heard them, hard at it, there in the library. Books and authors won’t keep their house or look after their family for them, I can tell them that, if it does come to anything, which I hope it won’t.”

“Finlay’s fine in the pulpit,” said John Murchison cautiously.

“Oh, the man’s well enough; it’s him I’m sorry for. I don’t call Advena fitted to be a wife, and last of all a minister’s. Abby was a treasure for any man to get, and Stella won’t turn out at all badly; she’s taking hold very well for her age. But Advena simply hasn’t got it in her, and that’s all there is to say about it.” Mrs. Murchison pulled her needles out right side out with finality. “I don’t deny the girl’s talented in her own way, but it’s no way to marry on. She’d much better make up her mind just to be a happy independent old maid; any woman might do worse. And take no responsibilities.”

“There would always be you, mother, for them to fall back on.” It was as near as John Murchison ever got to flattery.

“No thank you, then! I’ve brought up six of my own, as well as I was able, which isn’t saying much, and a hard life, I’ve had of it. Now I’m done with it; they’ll have to find somebody
else to fall back on. If they get themselves into such a mess” – Mrs. Murchison stopped to laugh with sincere enjoyment – “they needn’t look to me to get them out.”

“I guess you’d have a hand, mother.”

“Not I. But the man isn’t thinking of any such folly. What do you suppose his salary is?”

“Eight hundred and fifty dollars a year. They raised it last month.”

“And how far would Advena be able to make that go, with servants getting the money they do and expecting the washing put out as a matter of course? Do you remember Eliza, John, that we had when we were first married? Seven dollars a month she got; she would split wood at a pinch, and I’ve never had one since that could do up shirts like her. Three years and a half she was with me, and did everything, everything I didn’t do. But that was management, and Advena’s no manager. It would be me that would tell him, if I had the chance. Then he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. But I don’t think he has any such idea.”

“Advena,” pronounced Mr. Murchison, “might do worse.”

“Well, I don’t know whether she might. The creature is well enough to preach before a congregation. But what she can see in him out of the pulpit is more than I know. A great gawk of a fellow, with eyes that always look as if he were in the middle of next week! He may be able to talk to Advena, but he’s no hand at general conversation; I know he finds precious little to say to me. But he’s got no such notion. He comes here because, being human, he’s got to open his mouth some time or other, I suppose; but it’s my opinion he has neither Advena nor anybody else in his mind’s eye at present. He doesn’t go the right way about it.”

“H’m!” said John Murchison.

“He brought her a book the last time he came – what do you think the name of it was? The something or other of Plato! Do you call that a natural thing from a young man who is thinking seriously of a girl? Besides, if I know anything about Plato he was a Greek heathen, and no writer for a Presbyterian minister to go lending around. I’d Plato him to the rightabout if it was me!”

“She might read worse than Plato,” remarked John.

“Oh, well, she read it fast enough. She’s your own daughter for outlandish books. Mercy on us, here comes the man! We’ll just say ‘How d’ye do?’ to him, and then start for Abby’s, John. I’m not easy in my mind about the baby, and I haven’t been over since the morning. Harry says it’s nothing but stomach, but I think I know whooping-cough when I hear it. And if it is whooping-cough the boy will have to come here and rampage, I suppose, till they’re clear of it. There’s some use in grandmothers, if I do say it myself!”

I
f any one had told Mr. Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first notable interest of his life in the calling and the country to which even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far enough back in accounting for this, one would arrive at the female sort, sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from babyhood, good gaunt creature, half servant and half friend – the mature respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire village whence he came. With such as these, relations, actual and imagined, could only be of the most practical kind, matters to be arranged on grounds of expediency, and certainly not of the first importance. The things of first importance – what you could do with your energy and your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it of value to yourself – left little
room for the feminine consideration in Finlay’s eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any significance. Woman, in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an initiation to perceive her – a process to which Finlay would have been as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute of ideals about women – they would have formed in that case a strange exception to his general outlook – but he saw them on a plane detached and impersonal, concerned with the preservation of society, the maintenance of the home, the noble devotions of motherhood. Women had been known, historically, to be capable of lofty sentiments and fine actions: he would have been the last to withhold their due from women. But they were removed from the scope of his imagination, partly by the accidents I have mentioned, and partly, no doubt, by a simple lack in him of the inclination to seek and to know them.

So that Christie Cameron, when she came to stay with his aunt in Bross during the few weeks after his ordination and before his departure for Canada, found a fair light for judgment and more than a reasonable disposition to acquiesce in the scale of her merits, as a woman, on the part of Hugh Finlay. He was familiar with the scale of her merits before she came; his Aunt Lizzie did little but run them up and down. When she arrived she answered to every item: she was a good height, but not too tall; a nice figure of a woman, but not what you would call stout; a fresh-faced body whose excellent principles were written in every feature she had. She was five years older than Hugh, but even that he came to accept in Aunt Lizzie’s skilful exhibition as something to the total of her advantages. A pleasant independent creature with a hundred a
year of her own, sensible and vigorous and good-tempered, belonging as well to the pre-eminently right denomination, she had virtues that might have figured handsomely in an advertisement had Aunt Lizzie, in the plenitude of her good-will, thought fit to take that measure on Christie’s behalf. But nothing was farther from Aunt Lizzie’s mind. We must, in fairness, add Christie Cameron to the sum of Finlay’s acquaintance with the sex; but even then the total is slender, little to go upon.

Yet the fact which Mr. Finlay would in those days have considered so unimaginable remained; it had come into being and it remained. The chief interest of his life, the chief human interest, did lie in his relations with Advena Murchison. He might challenge it, but he could not move it; he might explain, but he could not alter it. And there had come no point at which it would have occurred to him to do either. When at last he had seen how simple and possible it was to enjoy Miss Murchison’s companionship upon unoccupied evenings he had begun to do it with eagerness and zest, the greater because Elgin offered him practically no other. Dr. Drummond lived, for purposes of intellectual contact, at the other end of the century, the other clergy and professional men of the town were separated from Finlay by all the mental predispositions that rose from the virgin soil. He was, as Mrs. Murchison said, a great gawk of a fellow; he had little adaptability; he was not of those who spend a year or two in the New World and go back with a trans-Atlantic accent, either of tongue or of mind. Where he saw a lack of dignity, of consideration, or of restraint, he did not insensibly become less dignified or considerate or restrained to smooth out perceptible differences; nor was he constituted to absorb the qualities of those defects, and enrich his nature by the geniality, the shrewdness, the quick mental
movement that stood on the other side of the account. He cherished in secret an admiration for the young men of Elgin, with their unappeasable energy and indomitable optimism, but he could not translate it in any language of sympathy; and but for Advena his soul would have gone uncomforted and alone.

Advena, as we know, was his companion. Seeing herself just that, constantly content to be just that, she walked beside him closer than he knew. She had her woman’s prescience and trusted it. Her own heart, all sweetly alive, counselled her to patience; her instincts laid her in bonds to concealment. She knew, she was sure; so sure that she could play sometimes, smiling, with her living heart –

she could say of his; and what was that but play, and tender laughter, at the expense of her own? And then, perhaps, looking up from the same book, she would whisper, alone in her room –

and gaze humbly through tears at her own face in the glass, loving it on his behalf. She took her passion with the weight of a thing ordained; she had come upon it where it waited for her, and they had gone on together, carrying the secret. There might be farther to go, but the way could never be long.

Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary; and Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was accomplished quickly, even summer.

“Except perhaps civilization,” she added. They were both young enough to be pleased with cleverness for its specious self.

“Oh, that is slow everywhere,” he observed; “but how you can say so, with every modern improvement staring you in the face –”