The Imperialist

CHAPTER XXVI

Christmas came and went. Dr Drummond had long accepted the innovation of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive by his business instinct, in everything but theology, where perhaps his business instinct also operated the other way, in favour of the sure thing. The Christmas Day service soon became one of those “special” occasions so dear to his heart, which made a demand upon him out of the ordinary way. He rose to these on the wing of the eagle, and his congregation never lacked the lesson that could be most dramatically drawn from them. His Christmas Day discourse gathered everything into it that could emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints’ days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and principle relentlessly indicated.

Dr Drummond loved, as I have said, all that asked for notable comment; the poet and the tragedian in him caught at the opportunity, and revelled in it. Public events carried him far, especially if they were disastrous, but what he most profited by was the dealing of Providence with members of his own congregation. Of all the occasions that inspired him, the funeral sermon was his happiest opportunity, nor was it, in his hands, by any means unstinted eulogy. Candid was his summing-up, behind the decent veil, the accepted apology of death; he was not afraid to refer to the follies of youth or the weaknesses of age in terms as unmistakable as they were kindly.

“Grace,” he said once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, “did more for her than ever nature had done.” He repeated it, too. “She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature,” and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice when the loss he deplored was that of a youth of virtue and promise, or that of a personal friend. His very text would be a blow upon the heart; the eyes filled from the beginning. People would often say that they were “sorry for the family,” sitting through Dr Drummond’s celebration of their bereavement; and the sympathy was probably well founded. But how fine he was when he paid the last tribute to that upright man, his elder and office-bearer, David Davidson! How his words marched, sorrowing to the close! “Much I have said of him, and more than he would have had me say.” Will it not stay with those who heard it till the very end, the trenchant, mournful fall of that “more than he would have had me say”?

It was a thing that Hugh Finlay could not abide in Dr Drummond.

As the winter passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr Drummond liked a pretty definite parallel; he had small opinion of the practice of drawing a pint out of a thimble, as he considered Finlay must have done when he preached the gospel of imperialism from Deuteronomy XXX, 14. “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” Moreover, to preach politics in Knox Church was a liberty in Finlay.

The fact that Finlay had been beforehand with him operated perhaps to reconcile the Doctor to his difficulty; and the candidature of one of his own members in what was practically the imperial interest no doubt increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless, he would not lose sight of the matter for more than two or three weeks together. Many an odd blow he delivered for its furtherance by way of illustrating higher things, and he kept it always, so to speak, in the practical politics of the long prayer.

It was Sunday evening, and Abby and her husband, as usual, had come to tea. The family was complete with the exception of Lorne, who had driven out to Clayfield with Horace Williams, to talk over some urgent matters with persons whom he would meet at supper at the Metropole Hotel at Clayfield. It was a thing Mrs Murchison thought little short of scandalous—supper to talk business on the Sabbath day, and in a hotel, a place of which the smell about the door was enough to knock you down, even on a weekday. Mrs Murchison considered, and did not scruple to say so, that politics should be left alone on Sundays. Clayfield votes might be very important, but there were such things as commandments, she supposed. “It’ll bring no blessing,” she declared severely, eyeing Lorne’s empty place.

The talk about the lamplit table was, nevertheless, all of the election, blessed or unblessed. It was not in human nature that it shouldn’t be, as Mrs Murchison would have very quickly told you if you had found her inconsistent. There was reason in all things, as she frequently said.

“I hear,” Alec had told them, “that Octavius Milburn is going around bragging he’s got the Elgin Chamber of Commerce consolidated this time.”

“Against us?” exclaimed Stella; and her brother said, “Of course!”

“Those Milburns,” remarked Mrs Murchison, “are enough to make one’s blood boil. I met Mrs Milburn in the market yesterday; she’d been pricing Mrs Crow’s ducks, and they were just five cents too dear for her, and she stopped—wonderful thing for her—and had SUCH an amount to say about Lorne, and the honour it was, and the dear only knows what! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—and Octavius Milburn doing all he knew against him the whole time! That’s the Milburns! I cut her remarkably short,” Mrs Murchison added, with satisfaction, “and when she’d made up her mind she’d have to give that extra five cents for the ducks because there weren’t any others to be had, she went back and found I’d bought them.”

“Well done, Mother!” said Alec, and Oliver remarked that if those were today’s ducks they were too good for the Milburn crowd, a lot.

“I expect she wanted them, too,” remarked Stella. “They’ve got the only Mr Hesketh staying with them now. Miss Filkin’s in a great state of excitement.”

“I guess we can spare them Hesketh,” said John Murchison.

“He’s a lobster,” said Stella with fervour.

“He seems to bring a frost where he goes,” continued Abby’s husband, “in politics, anyhow. I hear Lorne wants to make a present of him to the other side, for use wherever they’ll let him speak longest. Is it true he began his speech out at Jordanville—‘Gentlemen—and those of you who are not gentlemen’?”

“Could he have meant Mrs Farquharson and Miss Milburn?” asked Mr Murchison quietly, when the derision subsided; and they laughed again.

“He told me,” said Advena, “that he proposed to convert Mr Milburn to the imperial policy.”

“He’ll have his job cut out for him,” said her father.

“For my part,” Abby told them, “I think the Milburns are beneath contempt. You don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something ABOUT them—not that we ever come in contact with them,” she continued with dignity. “I believe they used to be patients of Dr Henry’s till he got up in years, but they don’t call in Harry.”

“Maybe that’s what there is about them,” said Mr Murchison, innocently.

“Father’s made up his mind,” announced Dr Harry, and they waited, breathless. There could be only one point upon which Dr Henry could be dubitating at that moment.

“He’s going to vote for Lorne.”

“He’s a lovely old darling!” cried Stella. “Good for Dr Henry Johnson! I knew he would.”

The rest were silent with independence and gratification. Dr Henry’s Conservatism had been supposed to be invincible. Dr Harry they thought a fair prey to Murchison influence, and he had capitulated early, but he had never promised to answer for his father.

“Yes, he’s taken his time about it, and he’s consulted about all the known authorities,” said his son, humorously. “Went right back to the Manchester school to begin with—sat out on the verandah reading Cobden and Bright the whole summer; if anybody came for advice sent ‘em in to me. I did a trade, I tell you! He thought they talked an awful lot of sense, those fellows—from the English point of view. ‘D’ye mean to tell me,’ he’d say, ‘that a generation born and bred in political doctrine of that sort is going to hold on to the colonies at a sacrifice? They’d rather let ‘em go at a sacrifice!’ Well, then he got to reading the other side of the question, and old Ormiston lent him Parkin, and he lent old Ormiston Goldwin Smith, and then he subscribed to the Times for six months—the bill must have nearly bust him; and then the squire went over without waiting for him and without any assistance from the Times either; and finally—well, he says that if it’s good enough business for the people of England it’s good enough business for him. Only he keeps on worrying about the people of England, and whether they’ll make enough by it to keep them contented, till he can’t next month all right, he wants it to be distinctly understood that family connection has nothing to do with it.”

“Of course it hasn’t,” Advena said.

“But we’re just as much obliged,” remarked Stella.

“A lot of our church people are going to stay at home election day,” declared Abby; “they won’t vote for Lorne, and they won’t vote against imperialism, so they’ll just sulk. Silly, I call it.”

“Good enough business for us,” said Alec.

“Well, what I want to know is,” said Mrs Murchison, “whether you are coming to the church you were born and brought up in, Abby, or not, tonight? There’s the first bell.”

“I’m not going to any church.” said Abby. “I went this morning. I’m going home to my baby.”

“Your father and mother,” said Mrs Murchison, “can go twice a day, and be none the worse for it. By the way, Father, did you know old Mrs Parr was dead? Died this morning at four o’clock. They telephoned for Dr Drummond, and I think they had little to do, for he had been up with her half the night already, Mrs Forsyth told me.”

“Did he go?” asked Mr Murchison.

“He did not, for the very good reason that he knew nothing about it. Mrs Forsyth answered the telephone, and told them he hadn’t been two hours in his bed, and she wouldn’t get him out again for an unconscious deathbed, and him with bronchitis on him and two sermons to preach today.”

“I’ll warrant Mrs Forsyth caught it in the morning,” said John Murchison.

“That she did. The doctor was as cross as two sticks that she hadn’t had him out to answer the phone. ‘I just spoke up,’ she said, ‘and told him I didn’t see how he was going to do any good to the pour soul over a telephone wire.’ ‘It isn’t that,’ he said, ‘but I might have put them on to Peter Fratch for the funeral. We’ve never had an undertaker in the church before,’ he said; ‘he’s just come, and he ought to be supported. Now I expect it’s too late, they’ll have gone to Liscombe.’ He rang them up right away, but they had.”

“Dr Drummond can’t stand Liscombe,” said Alec, as they all laughed a little at the Doctor’s foible, all except Advena, who laughed a great deal. She laughed wildly, then weakly. “I wouldn’t—think it a pleasure—to be buried by Liscombe myself!” she cried hysterically, and then laughed again until the tears ran down her face, and she lay back in her chair and moaned, still laughing.

Mr and Mrs Murchison, Alec, Stella, and Advena made up the family party; Oliver, for reasons of his own, would attend the River Avenue Methodist Church that evening. They slipped out presently into a crisp white winter night. The snow was banked on both sides of the street. Spreading garden fir trees huddled together weighted down with it; ragged icicles hung from the eaves or lay in long broken fingers on the trodden paths. The snow snapped and tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness, and etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic, almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in upon its own soul of the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and the silence, for a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels or other strangers to mark with curiosity. Mr and Mrs Murchison were neither angels nor strangers; they looked at it and saw that the Peterson place was still standing empty, and that old Mr Fisher hadn’t finished his new porch before zero weather came to stop him.

The young people were well ahead; Mrs Murchison, on her husband’s arm, stepped along with the spring of an impetus undisclosed.

“Is it to be the Doctor tonight?” asked John Murchison. “He was so hoarse this morning I wouldn’t be surprised to see Finlay in the pulpit. They’re getting only morning services in East Elgin just now, while they’re changing the lighting arrangements.”

“Are they, indeed? Well, I hope they’ll change them and be done with it, for I can’t say I’m anxious for too much of their Mr Finlay in Knox Church.”

“Oh, you like the man well enough for a change, Mother!” John assured her.

“I’ve nothing to say against his preaching. It’s the fellow himself. And I hope we won’t get him tonight for, the way I feel now, if I see him gawking up the pulpit steps it’ll be as much as I can do to keep in my seat, and so I just tell you, John.”

“You’re a little out of patience with him, I see,” said Mr Murchison.

“And it would be a good thing if more than me were out of patience with him. There’s such a thing as too much patience, I’ve noticed.”

“I dare say,” replied her husband, cheerfully.

“If Advena were any daughter of mine she’d have less patience with him.”

“She’s not much like you,” assented the father.

“I must say I like a girl to have a little spirit if a man has none. And before I’d have him coming to the house week after week the way he has, I’d see him far enough.”

“He might as well come there as anywhere,” Mr Murchison replied, ambiguously. “I suppose he has now and then time on his hands?”

“Well, he won’t have it on his hands much longer.”

“He won’t, eh?”

“No, he won’t,” Mrs Murchison almost shook the arm she was attached to. “John, I think you might show a little interest! The man’s going to be married.”

“You don’t say that?” John Murchison’s tone expressed not only astonishment but concern. Mrs Murchison was almost mollified.

“But I do say it. His future wife is coming here to Elgin next month, she and her aunt, or her grandmother, or somebody, and they’re to stay at Dr Drummond’s and be married as soon as possible.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr Murchison, which was his way of expressing simple astonishment.

“There’s no nonsense about it. Advena told me herself this afternoon.”

“Did she seem put out about it?”

“She’s not a girl to show it,” Mrs Murchison hedged, “if she was. I just looked at her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a piece of news. When did you hear it?’ I said. ‘Oh, I’ve known it all the winter!’ says my lady. What I wanted to say was that for an engaged man he had been pretty liberal with his visits, but she had such a queer look in her eyes I couldn’t express myself, somehow.”

“It was just as well left unsaid,” her husband told her, thoughtfully.

“I’m not so sure,” Mrs Murchison retorted. “You’re a great man, John, for letting everything alone. When he’s been coming here regularly for more than a year, putting ideas into the girl’s head—”

“He seems to have told her how things were.”

“That’s all very well—if he had kept himself to himself at the same time.”

“Well, Mother, you know you never thought much of the prospect.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mrs Murchison said. “It wouldn’t be me that would be married to him, and I’ve always said so. But I’d got more or less used to it,” she confessed. “The man’s well enough in some ways. Dear knows there would be a pair of them—one’s as much of a muddler as the other! And anybody can see with half an eye that Advena likes him. It hasn’t turned out as I expected, that’s a fact, John, and I’m just very much annoyed.”

“I’m not best pleased about it myself,” said John Murchison, expressing, as usual, a very small proportion of the regret that he felt, “but I suppose they know their own business.”

Thus, in their different ways, did these elder ones also acknowledge their helplessness before the advancing event. They could talk of it in private and express their dissatisfaction with it, and that was all they could do. It would not be a matter much further turned over between them at best. They would be shy of any affair of sentiment in terms of speech, and from one that affected a member of the family, self-respect would help to pull them the other way. Mrs Murchison might remember it in the list of things which roused her vain indignation; John Murchison would put it away in the limbo of irremediables that were better forgotten. For the present they had reached the church door.

Mrs Murchison saw with relief that Dr Drummond occupied his own pulpit, but if her glance had gone the length of three pews behind her she would have discovered that Hugh Finlay made one of the congregation. Fortunately, perhaps, for her enjoyment of the service, she did not look round. Dr Drummond was more observing, but his was a position of advantage. In the accustomed sea of faces two, heavy shadowed and obstinately facing fate, swam together before Dr Drummond, and after he had lifted his hands and closed his eyes for the long prayer he saw them still. So that these words occurred, near the end, in the long prayer—

“O Thou Searcher of hearts, who hast known man from the beginning, to whom his highest desires and his loftiest intentions are but as the desires and intentions of a little child, look with Thine own compassion, we beseech Thee, upon souls before Thee in any peculiar difficulty. Our mortal life is full of sin, it is also full of the misconception of virtue. Do Thou clear the understanding, O Lord, of such as would interpret Thy will to their own undoing; do Thou teach them that as happiness may reside in chastening, so chastening may reside in happiness. And though such stand fast to their hurt, do Thou grant to them in Thine own way, which may not be our way, a safe issue out of the dangers that beset them.”

Dr Drummond had his own method of reconciling foreordination and free will. To Advena his supplication came with that mysterious double emphasis of chance words that fit. Her thought played upon them all through the sermon, rejecting and rejecting again their application and their argument and the spring of hope in them. She, too, knew that Finlay was in church and, half timidly, she looked back for him, as the congregation filed out again into the winter streets. But he, furious, and more resolved than ever, had gone home by another way.