The Imperialist

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 busy as that, Miss Filkin.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure Mr Murchison won’t forget his native town altogether,” said Mrs Milburn, “though perhaps he won’t like it so well after seeing dear old England!”

“I expect,” said Lorne simply, “to like it better.”

“Well, of course, we shall all be pleased if you say that, Mr Murchison,” Mrs Milburn replied graciously. “We shall feel quite complimented. But I’m afraid you will find a great deal to criticize when you come back—that is, if you go at all into society over there. I always say there can be nothing like good English society.”

“I want to attend a sitting of the House,” Lorne said. “I hope I shall have time for that. I want to see those fellows handling their public business. I don’t believe I shall find our men so far behind, for point of view and grasp and dispatch. Of course there’s always Wallingham to make a standard for us all. But they haven’t got so many Wallinghams.”

“Wasn’t it Wallingham, Louisa, that Mr Milburn was saying at breakfast was such a dangerous man? So able, he said, but dangerous. Something to do with the tariff.”

“Oh?” said Lorne, and he said no more, for at that moment Dora came in. She came in looking very straight and graceful and composed. Her personal note was carried out in her pretty clothes, which hung and “sat” upon her like the rhythm of verses; they could fall no other way. She had in every movement the definite accent of young ladyhood; she was very much aware of herself, of the situation, and of her value in it, a setting for herself she saw it, and saw it truly. No one, from the moment she entered the room, looked at anything else.

“Oh, Mr Murchison,” she said. “How do you do? Mother, do you mind if I open the window? It’s quite warm out of doors—regular summer.”

Lorne sprang to open the window, while Miss Filkin, murmuring that it had been a beautiful day, moved a little farther from it.

“Oh, please don’t trouble, Mr Murchison; thank you very much!” Miss Milburn continued, and subsided on a sofa. “Have you been playing tennis this week?”

Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only once.

“The courts aren’t a bit in good order. They want about a week’s rolling. The balls get up anywhere,” said Dora.

“Lawn tennis,” Mrs Milburn asserted herself, “is a delightful exercise. I hope it will never go out of fashion; but that is what we used to say of croquet, and it has gone out and come in again.”

Lorne listened to this with deference; there was a hint of patience in the regard Dora turned upon her mother. Mrs Milburn continued to dilate upon lawn tennis, dealt lightly with badminton, and brought the conversation round with a graceful sweep to canoeing. Dora’s attitude before she had done became slightly permissive, but Mrs Milburn held on till she had accomplished her conception of conduct for the occasion; then she remembered a meeting in the schoolhouse.

“We are to have an address by an Indian bishop,” she told them. “He is on his way to England by China and Japan, and is staying with our dear rector, Mr Murchison. Such a treat I expect it will be.”

“What I am dying to know,” said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, “is whether he is black or white!”

Mrs Milburn then left the room, and shortly afterward Miss Filkin thought she could not miss the bishop either, conveying the feeling that a bishop was a bishop, of whatever colour. She stayed three minutes longer than Mrs Milburn, but she went. The Filkin tradition, though strong, could not hold out entirely against the unwritten laws, the silently claimed privileges, of youth in Elgin. It made its pretence and vanished.

Even as the door closed the two that were left looked at one another with a new significance. A simpler relation established itself between them and controlled all that surrounded them; the very twilight seemed conscious with it; the chairs and tables stood in attentive harmony.

“You know,” said Dora, “I hate your going, Lorne!”

She did indeed seem moved, about the mouth, to discontent. There was some little injury in the way she swung her foot.

“I was hoping Mr Fulke wouldn’t get better in time; I was truly!”

The gratitude in young Murchison’s eyes should have been dear to her. I don’t know whether she saw it; but she must have been aware that she was saying what touched him, making her point.

“Oh, it’s a good thing to go, Dora.”

“A good thing for you! And the regatta coming off the first week in June, and a whole crowd coming from Toronto for it. There isn’t another person in town I care to canoe with, Lorne, you know perfectly well!”

“I’m awfully sorry!” said Lorne. “I wish—”

“Oh, I’m GOING, I believe. Stephen Stuart has written from Toronto, and asked me to sail with him. I haven’t told Mother, but he’s my second cousin, so I suppose she won’t make a fuss.”

The young man’s face clouded; seeing which she relented. “Oh, of course, I’m glad you’re going, really,” she assured him. “And we’ll all be proud to be acquainted with such a distinguished gentleman when you get back. Do you think you’ll see the King? You might, you know, in London.”

“I’ll see him if he’s visible,” laughed Lorne. “That would be something to tell your mother, wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid we won’t be doing business with His Majesty.”

“I expect you’ll have the loveliest time you ever had in all your life. Do you think you’ll be asked out much, Lorne?”

“I can’t imagine who would ask me. We’ll get off easy if the street boys don’t shout: ‘What price Canucks?’ at us! But I’ll see England, Dora; I’ll feel England, eat and drink and sleep and live in England, for a little while. Isn’t the very name great? I’ll be a better man for going, till I die. We’re all right out here, but we’re young and thin and weedy. They didn’t grow so fast in England, to begin with, and now they’re rich with character and strong with conduct and hoary with ideals. I’ve been reading up the history of our political relations with England. It’s astonishing what we’ve stuck to her through, but you can’t help seeing why—it’s for the moral advantage. Way down at the bottom, that’s what it is. We have the sense to want all we can get of that sort of thing. They’ve developed the finest human product there is, the cleanest, the most disinterested, and we want to keep up the relationship—it’s important. Their talk about the value of their protection doesn’t take in the situation as it is now. Who would touch us if we were running our own show?”

“I don’t believe they are a bit better than we are,” replied Miss Milburn. “I’m sure I haven’t much opinion of the Englishmen that come out here. They don’t think anything of getting into debt, and as often as not they drink, and they never know enough to—to come in out of the rain. But, Lorne—”

“Yes, but we’re very apt to get the failures. The fellows their folks give five or six hundred pounds to and tell them they’re not expected back till they’re making a living. The best men find their level somewhere else, along recognized channels. Lord knows we don’t want them—this country’s for immigrants. We’re manufacturing our own gentlemen quite fast enough for the demand.”

“I should think we were! Why, Lorne, Canadians—nice Canadians are just as gentlemanly as they can be! They’ll compare with anybody. Perhaps Americans have got more style:” she weighed the matter; “but Canadians are much better form, I think. But, Lorne, how perfectly dear of you to send me those roses. I wore them, and nobody there had such beauties. All the girls wanted to know where I got them, but I only told Lily, just to make her feel a pig for not having asked you—my very greatest friend! She just about apologized—told me she wanted to ask about twenty more people, but her mother wouldn’t let her. They’ve lost an uncle or something lately, and if it hadn’t been for Clara Sims staying with them they wouldn’t have been giving anything.”

“I’ll try to survive not having been asked. But I’m glad you wore the roses, Dora.”

“I dropped one, and Phil Carter wanted to keep it. He’s so silly!”

“Did you—did you let him keep it?”

“Lorne Murchison! Do you think I’d let any man keep a rose I’d been wearing?”

He looked at her, suddenly emboldened. “I don’t know about roses, Dora, but pansies—those are awfully nice ones in your dress. I’m very fond of pansies; couldn’t you spare me one? I wouldn’t ask for a rose, but a pansy—”

His eyes were more ardent than what he found to say. Beneath them Dora grew delicately pink. The pansies drooped a little; she put her slender fingers under one, and lifted its petals.

“It’s too faded for your buttonhole,” she said.

“It needn’t stay in my buttonhole. I know lots of other places!” he begged.

Dora considered the pansy again, then she pulled it slowly out, and the young man got up and went over to her, proffering the lapel of his coat.

“It spoils the bunch,” she said prettily. “If I give you this you will have to give me something to take its place.”

“I will,” said Lorne.

“I know it will be something better,” said Dora, and there was a little effort in her composure. “You send people such beautiful flowers, Lorne.”

She rose beside him as she spoke, graceful and fair, to fasten it in; and it was his hand that shook.

“Then may I choose it?” said Lorne. “And will you wear it?”

“I suppose you may. Why are you—why do you—Oh, Lorne, stand still!”

“I’ll give you, you sweet girl, my whole heart!” he said in the vague tender knowledge that he offered her a garden, where she had but to walk, and smile, to bring about her unimaginable blooms.