If anyone 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 or 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 judgement 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 their 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—
The nightingale was not yet heard For the rose was not yet blown,
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—
Oh, speed the day, thou dear, dear May,
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—”
“Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t the products,” and she laughed. “But the thing itself, the precious thing; that never comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art of choice—”
“If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?” he demanded. “Anaemia.”
“Oh, I don’t quarrel with the logic of it. I only point out the fact. To do that is to acquiesce, really. I acquiesce; I have to. But one may long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life has gone on longer.”
“I imagine,” Finlay said, “that to wish truly and ardently for such things is to possess them. If you didn’t possess them you wouldn’t desire them! As they say, as they say—”
“As they say?”
“About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is to be fatally infected.”
“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.
“Some novelist. I—I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon the verandah. “I don’t write novels,” he said.
“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena. “I mean, of course,” she added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”
“Heaven forbid!”
“Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it comes into your scope. You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it; you can’t feel it without living it. I don’t write novels either, but I experience—whole publishers’ lists.”
“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date. You see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern moral sophistications—?”
“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied. “I often do.”
“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stories of pain”—he looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her adoration—“and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the human heart. At least one likes to hope so.”
“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”
Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost irritably. “I only meant that I see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle. There’s reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think that you don’t half realize, in a country like this, how much there is to make up.”
“Is there anything really to make up?” she asked.
“Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as education! Here you can’t even conceive it—the schools have been on logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion; here it doesn’t even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. ‘By all mean let the ministers serve education on the School Boards,’ they would say, ‘by election like other people’—an opportunity, by the way, which has just been offered to me. I’m nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett, the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too; there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls’ playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring.”
“You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes there is something in a fresh start: we’re on the straight road as a nation, in most respects; we haven’t any picturesque old prescribed lanes to travel. So you think that makes up?”
“It’s one thing. You might put down space—elbow-room.”
“An empty horizon,” Advena murmured.
“For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England has filled hers up. She has now—these,” and he nodded at a window open to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.
“Oh, if you have a creative imagination,” she said “like Wallingham’s. But even then your vision must be only political economic, material. You can’t conceive the—flowers—that will come out of all that. And if you could it wouldn’t be like having them.”
“And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid, buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the plenty of things!”
“I am to be consoled because apples are cheap.”
“You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn’t it console you to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?”
“No,” said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said—
“And those things aren’t all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the human spirit, as it is set free in these wide unblemished spaces, may be something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is good and beautiful—”
He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful blush.
“I am glad you are so well satisfied,” she said, and then, as if her words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.
Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.
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