The Imperialist

CHAPTER XVIII

Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out beside it, twice every Sunday for twenty years. He was a small spare man, with thin grey hair that fell back from the narrow dome of his forehead to his coat collar, decent and severe. He ascended the pulpit exactly three minutes before the minister did; and the dignity with which he put one foot before the other made his appearance a ceremonious feature of the service and a thing quoted. “I was there before Peter” was a triumphant evidence of punctuality. Dr Drummond would have liked to make it a test. It seemed to him no great thing to expect the people of Knox Church to be there before Peter.

Macfarlane was also in attendance in the vestry to help the minister off with his gown and hang it up. Dr Drummond’s gown needed neither helping nor hanging; the Doctor was deftness and neatness and impatience itself, and would have it on the hook with his own hands, and never a fold crooked. After Mr Finlay, on the contrary, Peter would have to pick up and smooth out—ten to one the garment would be flung on a chair. Still, he was invariably standing by to see it flung, and to hand Mr Finlay his hat and stick. He was surprised and put about to find himself one Sunday evening too late for this attendance. The vestry was empty, the gown was on the floor. Peter gathered it up with as perturbed an air as if Mr Finlay had omitted a point of church observance. “I doubt they get into slack ways in these missions,” said Peter. He had been unable, with Dr Drummond, to see the necessity for such extensions.

Meanwhile Hugh Finlay, in secular attire, had left the church by the vestry door, and was rapidly overtaking groups of his hearers as they walked homeward. He was unusually aware of his change of dress because of a letter in the inside pocket of his coat. The letter, in that intimate place, spread a region of consciousness round it which hastened his blood and his step. There was purpose in his whole bearing; Advena Murchison, looking back at some suggestion of Lorne’s, caught it, and lost for a moment the meaning of what she said. When he overtook them, with plain intention, she walked beside the two men, withdrawn and silent, like a child. It was unexpected and overwhelming, his joining them after the service, accompanying them, as it were, in the flesh after having led them so far in the spirit; he had never done it before. She felt her heart confronted with a new, an immediate issue, and suddenly afraid. It shrank from the charge for which it longed, and would have fled; yet, paralysed with delight, it kept time with her sauntering feet.

They talked of the sermon, which had been strongly tinged with the issue of the day. Dreamer as he was by temperament, Finlay held to the wisdom of informing great public questions with the religious idea, vigorously disclaimed that it was anywhere inadmissible.

“You’ll have to settle with the Doctor, Mr Finlay,” Lorne warned him gaily, “if you talk politics in Knox Church. He thinks he never does.”

“Do you think,” said Finlay, “that he would object to—to one’s going as far afield as I did tonight?”

“He oughtn’t to,” said Lorne. “You should have heard him when old Sir John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation couldn’t say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits.”

Finlay smiled gravely. “Political convictions are a man’s birthright,” he said. “Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them. But of course there are limits beyond which pulpit influence should not go, and I am sure Dr Drummond has the clearest perception of them. He seems to have been a wonderful fellow, Macdonald, a man with extraordinary power of imaginative enterprise. I wonder whether he would have seen his way to linking up the Empire as he linked up your Provinces here?”

“He’d have hated uncommonly to be in opposition, but I don’t see how he could have helped it,” Lorne said. “He was the godfather of Canadian manufacturers, you know—the Tories have always been the industrial party. He couldn’t have gone for letting English stuff in free, or cheap; and yet he was genuinely loyal and attached to England. He would discriminate against Manchester with tears in his eyes! Imperialist in his time spelled Conservative, now it spells Liberal. The Conservatives have always talked the loudest about the British bond, but when it lately came to doing we’re on record on the right side, and they’re on record on the wrong. But it must make the old man’s ghost sick to see—”

“To see his court suit stolen,” Advena finished for him. “As Disraeli said—wasn’t it Disraeli?” She heard, and hated the note of constraint in her voice. “Am I reduced,” she thought, indignantly, “to falsetto?” and chose, since she must choose, the betrayal of silence.

“It did one good to hear the question discussed on the higher level,” said Lorne. “You would think, to read the papers, that all its merits could be put into dollars and cents.”

“I’ve noticed some of them in terms of sentiment—affection for the mother country—”

“Yes, that’s lugged in. But it doesn’t cover the moral aspect,” Lorne returned. “It’s too easy and obvious, as well; it gives the enemy cause to offend.”

“Well, there’s a tremendous moral aspect,” Finlay said, “tremendous moral potentialities hidden in the issue. England has more to lose than she dreams.”

“That’s just where I felt, as a practical politician, a little restless while you were preaching,” said Lorne, laughing. “You seemed to think the advantage of imperialism was all with England. You mustn’t press that view on us, you know. We shall get harder to bargain with. Besides, from the point of your sermon, it’s all the other way.”

“Oh, I don’t agree! The younger nations can work out their own salvation unaided; but can England alone? Isn’t she too heavily weighted?”

“Oh, materially, very likely! But morally, no,” said Lorne, stoutly. “There, if you like, she has accumulations that won’t depreciate. Money isn’t the only capital the colonies offer investment for.”

“I’m afraid I see it in the shadow of the degeneration of age and poverty,” said Finlay, smiling—“or age and wealth, if you prefer it.”

“And we in the disadvantage of youth and easy success,” Lorne retorted. “We’re all very well, but we’re not the men our fathers were: we need a lot of licking into shape. Look at that disgraceful business of ours in the Ontario legislature the other day, and look at that fellow of yours walking out of office at Westminster last session because of a disastrous business connection which he was morally as clear of as you or I! I tell you we’ve got to hang on to the things that make us ashamed; and I guess we’ve got sense enough to know it. But this is my corner. I am going to look in at the Milburns’, Advena. Good night, Mr Finlay.”

Advena, walking on with Finlay, became suddenly aware that he had not once addressed her. She had the quick impression that Lorne left him bereft of a refuge; his plight heartened her.

“If the politicians on both sides were only as mutually appreciative,” she said, “the Empire would soon be knit.”

For a moment he did not answer. “I am afraid the economic situation is not quite analogous,” he said, stiffly and absently, when the moment had passed.

“Why does your brother always call me ‘Mr’ Finlay?” he demanded presently. “It isn’t friendly.”

The note of irritation in his voice puzzled her. “I think the form is commoner with us,” she said, “even among men who know each other fairly well.” Her secret glance flashed over the gulf that nevertheless divided Finlay and her brother, that would always divide them. She saw it with something like pain, which struggled through her pride in both. “And then, you know—your calling—”

“I suppose it is that,” he replied, ill content.

“I’ve noticed Dr Drummond’s way,” she told him, with rising spirits. “It’s delightful. He drops the ‘Mr’ with fellow-ministers of his own denomination only—never with Wesleyans or Baptists, for a moment. He always comes back very genial from the General Assembly, and full of stories. ‘I said to Grant,’ or ‘Macdonald said to me’—and he always calls you ‘Finlay,’” she added shyly. “By the way, I suppose you know he’s to be the new Moderator?”

“Is he, indeed? Yes—yes, of course, I knew! We couldn’t have a better.”

They walked on through the early autumn night. It was just not raining. The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which lay thick under their feet. Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along. She had picked up half a dozen when he spoke again. “I want to tell you—I have to tell you—something—about myself, Miss Murchison.”

“I should like,” said Advena steadily, “to hear.”

“It is a matter that has, I am ashamed to confess, curiously gone out of my mind of late—I should say until lately. There was little until lately—I am so poor a letter writer—to remind me of it. I am engaged to be married!”

“But how interesting!” exclaimed Advena.

He looked at her taken aback. His own mood was heavy; it failed to answer this lightness from her. It is hard to know what he expected, what his unconscious blood expected for him; but it was not this. If he had little wisdom about the hearts of women, he had less about their behaviour. She said nothing more, but inclined her head in an angle of deference and expectation toward what he should further communicate.

“I don’t know that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland,” he went on. “It has always seemed to me so remote and—disconnected with everything here. I could not suppose it would interest anyone. I was cared for and educated by my father’s only sister, a good woman. It was as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed in work. I don’t know that I can make you understand. She was identified with all the rest—I left it to her. Shortly before I sailed for Canada she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and—welfare, and with—a niece of her husband’s who was staying with us at the time, a person suitable in every way. Apart from my aunt, I do not know—However, I owed everything to her, and I—took her advice in the matter. I left it to her. She is a managing woman; but she can nearly always prove herself right. Her mind ran a great deal, a little too much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in emigrating a man might do well to companion himself.”

“That was prudent of her,” said Advena.

He turned a look upon her. “You are not—making a mock of it?” he said.

“I am not making a mock of it.”

“My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie’s home has been broken up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to write.”

He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed the turning to the Murchisons’, walking on with the single consciousness of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not know.

“You are to write,” she said. She sought in vain for more words; he also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.

“It seems so extraordinarily—far away,” said Hugh Finlay, of Bross, Dumfries, at length.

“But it will come near,” Advena replied.

“I don’t think it ever can.”

She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.

“They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and the man whom I remember to have been me—there is a gulf fixed—”

“It is only the Atlantic,” Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.

He shook his head. “It is not marked in any geography,” he said, and gave her a troubled smile. “How can I make it clear to you? I have come here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before. I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty and charm of mere vitality—you have always been so alive. One finds a physical freedom in which one’s very soul seems to expand; one hears the happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to respond—”

The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm, healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his, could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.

It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short of man’s dignity, of man’s estate, for his own sake.

“It is a curious history,” she said. “You are right in thinking I should not find it quite easy to understand. We make those—arrangements—so much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important than they are.”

“But they are of the highest importance.” He stopped short, confounded.

“I shall try to consecrate my marriage,” he said presently, more to himself than to Advena.

Her thought told him bitterly: “I am afraid it is the only thing you can do with it,” but something else came to her lips.

“I have not congratulated you. I am not sure,” she went on, with astonishing candour, “whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all my heart. Are you happy now?”

He turned his great dark eyes on her. “I am as happy, I dare say, as I have any need to be.”

“But you are happier since your letter came?”

“No,” he said. The simple word fell on her heart, and she forbore.

They went on again in silence until they arrived at a place from which they saw the gleam of the river and the line of the hills beyond. Advena stopped.

“We came here once before together—in the spring. Do you remember?” she asked.

“I remember very well.” She had turned, and he with her. They stood together with darkness about them, through which they could just see each other’s faces.

“It was spring then, and I went back alone. You are still living up that street? Good night, then, please. I wish again—to go back—alone.”

He looked at her for an instant in dumb bewilderment, though her words were simple enough. Then as she made a step away from him he caught her hand.

“Advena,” he faltered, “what has happened to us? This time I cannot let you.”