The Imperialist

CHAPTER XXXII

It was late afternoon when the train from the West deposited Hugh Finlay upon the Elgin platform, the close of one of those wide, wet, uncertain February days when the call of spring is on the wind though spring is weeks away. The lights of the town flashed and glimmered down the streets under the bare swaying maple branches. The early evening was full of soft bluster; the air was conscious with an appeal of nature, vague yet poignant. The young man caught at the strange sympathy that seemed to be abroad for his spirit. He walked to his house, courting it, troubled by it. They were expecting him that evening at Dr Drummond’s, and there it was his intention to go. But on his way he would call for a moment to see Advena Murchison. He had something to tell her. It would be news of interest at Dr Drummond’s also; but it was of no consequence, within an hour or so, when they should receive it there, while it was of great consequence that Advena should hear it at the earliest opportunity, and from him. There is no weighing or analysing the burden of such a necessity as this. It simply is important: it makes its own weight; and those whom it concerns must put aside other matters until it has been accomplished. He would tell her: they would accept it for a moment together, a moment during which he would also ascertain whether she was well and strong, with a good chance of happiness—God protect her—in the future that he should not know. Then he would go on to Dr Drummond’s.

The wind had risen when he went out again; it blew a longer blast, and the trees made a steady sonorous rhythm in it. The sky was full of clouds that dashed upon the track of a failing moon; there was portent everywhere, and a hint of tumult at the end of the street. No two ways led from Finlay’s house to his first destination. River Street made an angle with that on which the Murchisons lived—half a mile to the corner, and three-quarters the other way. Drops drove in his face as he strode along against the wind, stilling his unquiet heart, that leaped before him to that brief interview. As he took the single turning he came into the full blast of the veering, irresolute storm. The street was solitary and full of the sound of the blown trees, wild and uplifting. Far down the figure of a woman wavered before the wind across the zone of a blurred lamp-post. She was coming toward him. He bent his head and lowered his umbrella and lost sight of her as they approached, she with the storm behind her, driven with hardly more resistance than the last year’s blackened leaves that blew with her, he assailed by it and making the best way he could. Certainly the wind was taking her part and his, when in another moment her skirt whipped against him and he saw her face glimmer out. A mere wreck of lines and shadows it seemed in the livid light, with suddenly perceiving eyes and lips that cried his name. She had on a hat and a cloak, but carried no umbrella, and her hands were bare and wet. Pitifully the storm blew her into his arms, a tossed and straying thing that could not speak for sobs; pitifully and with a rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that refuge. A rising fear and a great solicitude laid a finger upon his craving embrace of her; he had a sense of something strangely different in her, of the unknown irremediable. Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had never been before; her plight but made her in a manner sweeter; the storm that brought her barricaded them in the empty spaces of the street with a divinely entreating solitude. He had been prepared to meet her in the lighted decorum of her father’s house and he knew what he should say. He was not prepared to take her out of the tempest, helpless and weeping and lost for the harbour of his heart, and nothing could he say. He locked his lips against all that came murmuring to them. But his arms tightened about her and he drew her into the shelter of a wall that jutted out in the irregular street; and there they stood and clung together in a long, close, broken silence that covered the downfall of her spirit. It was the moment of their great experience of one another; never again, in whatever crisis, could either know so deep, so wonderful a fathoming of the other soul. Once as it passed, Advena put up her hand and touched his cheek: There were tears on it, and she trembled, and wound her arm about his neck, and held up her face to his. “No,” he muttered, and crushed it against his breast. There without complaint she let it lie; she was all submission to him: his blood leaped and his spirit groaned with the knowledge of it.

“Why did you come out? Why did you come, dear?” he said at last.

“I don’t know. There was such a wind. I could not stay in the house.”

She spoke timidly, in a voice that should have been new to him, but that it was, above all, her voice.

“I was on my way to you.”

“I know. I thought you might perhaps come. If you had not—I think I was on my way to you.”

It seemed not unnatural.

“Did you find—any message from me when you came?” she asked presently, in a quieted, almost a contented tone.

It shot—the message—before his eyes, though he had seen it no message, in the preoccupation of his arrival.

“I found a rose on my dressing-table,” he told her; and the rose stood for him in a wonder of tenderness, looking back.

“I smuggled it in,” she confessed, “I knew your old servant—she used to be with us. The others—from Dr Drummond’s—have been there all day making it warm and comfortable for you. I had no right to do anything like that, but I had the right, hadn’t I, to bring the rose?”

“I don’t know,” he answered her, hard-pressed, “how we are to bear this.”

She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of a surgeon’s knife.

“We are not to bear it,” she said eagerly. “The rose is to tell you that. I didn’t mean it, when I left it, to be anything more—more than a rose; but now I do. I didn’t even know when I came out tonight. But now I do. We aren’t to bear it, Hugh. I don’t want it so—now. I can’t—can’t have it so.”

She came nearer to him again and caught with her two hands the lapels of his coat. He closed his own over them and looked down at her in that half-detachment, which still claimed and held her.

“Advena,” he whispered, out of the sudden clamour in his mind, “she can’t be—she isn’t—nothing has happened to her?”

She smiled faintly, but her eyes were again full of fear at his implication of the only way.

“Oh, no!” she said. “But you have been away, and she has come. I have seen her; and oh! she won’t care, Hugh—she won’t care.”

Her asking, straining face seemed to gather and reflect all the light there was in the shifting night about them. The rain had stopped, but the wind still hurtled past, whirling the leaves from one darkness to another. They were as isolated, as outlawed there in the wild wet wind as they were in the confusion of their own souls.

“We must care,” he said helplessly, clinging to the sound and form of the words.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “No, no! Indeed I know now what is possible and what is not!”

For an instant her eyes searched the rigid lines of his face in astonishment. In their struggle to establish the impossible she had been so far ahead, so greatly the more confident and daring, had tempted him to such heights, scorning every dizzy verge, that now, when she turned quite back from their adventure, humbly confessing it too hard, she could not understand how he should continue to set himself doggedly toward it. Perhaps, too, she trusted unconsciously in her prerogative. He loved her, and she him: before she would not, now she would. Before she had preferred an ideal to the desire of her heart; now it lay about her; her strenuous heart had pulled it down to foolish ruin, and how should she lie abased with it and see him still erect and full of the deed they had to do?

“Come,” he said, “let me take you home, dear,” and at that and some accent in it that struck again at hope, she sank at his feet in a torrent of weeping, clasping them and entreating him, “Oh send her away! Send her away!”

He lifted her, and was obliged literally to support her. Her hat had fallen off; he stroked her hair and murmured such comfort to her as we have for children in their extremity, of which the burden is chiefly love and “Don’t cry.” She grew gradually quieter, drawing one knows not what restitution from the intrinsic in him; but there was no pride in her, and when she said “Let me go home now,” it was the broken word of hapless defeat. They struggled together out into the boisterous street, and once or twice she failed and had to stop and turn. Then she would cling to a wall or a tree, putting his help aside with a gesture in which there was again some pitiful trace of renunciation. They went almost without a word, each treading upon the heart of the other toward the gulf that was to come. They reached it at the Murchisons’ gate, and there they paused, as briefly as possible, since pause was torture, and he told her what he could not tell her before.

“I have accepted the charge of the White Water Mission Station in Alberta,” he said. “I, too, learned very soon after I left you what was possible and what was not. I go as soon as—things can be set in order here. Good-bye, my dear love, and may God help us both.”

She looked at him with a pitiful effort at a steady lip. “I must try to believe it,” she said. “And afterward, when it comes true for you, remember this—I was ashamed.”

Then he saw her pass into her father’s house, and he took the road to his duty and Dr Drummond’s.

His extremity was very great. Through it lines came to him from the beautiful archaic inheritance of his Church. He strode along hearing them again and again in the dying storm.

   So, I do stretch my hands
      To Thee my help alone;
   Thou only understands
      All my complaint and moan.

He listened to the prayer on the wind, which seemed to offer it for him, listened and was gravely touched. But he himself was far from the throes of supplication. He was looking for the forces of his soul; and by the time he reached Dr Drummond’s door we may suppose that he had found them.

Sarah who let him in, cried, “How wet you are, Mr Finlay!” and took his overcoat to dry in the kitchen. The Scotch ladies, she told him, and Mrs Forsyth, had gone out to tea, but they would be back right away, and meanwhile “the Doctor” was expecting him in the study—he knew the way.

Finlay did know the way but, as a matter of fact, there had been time for him to forget it; he had not crossed Dr Drummond’s threshold since the night on which the Doctor had done all, as he would have said, that was humanly possible to bring him, Finlay, to reason upon the matter of his incredible entanglement in Bross. The door at the end of the passage was ajar however, as if impatient; and Dr Drummond himself, standing in it, heightened that appearance, with his “Come you in, Finlay. Come you in!”

The Doctor looked at the young man in a manner even more acute, more shrewd, and more kindly than was his wont. His eye searched Finlay thoroughly, and his smile seemed to broaden as his glance travelled.

“Man,” he said, “you’re shivering,” and rolled him an armchair near the fire. (“The fellow came into the room,” he would say, when he told the story afterward to the person most concerned, “as if he were going to the stake!”) “This is extraordinary weather we are having, but I think the storm is passing over.”

“I hope,” said Finlay, “that my aunt and Miss Cameron are well. I understand they are out.”

“Oh, very well—finely. They’re out at present, but you’ll see them bye-and-bye. An excellent voyage over they had—just the eight days. But we’ll be doing it in less than that when the new fast line is running to Halifax. But four days of actual ocean travelling they say now it will take. Four days from imperial shore to shore! That should incorporate us—that should bring them out and take us home.”

The Doctor had not taken a seat himself, but was pacing the study, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets; and a touch of embarrassment seemed added to the inveterate habit.

“I hear the ladies had pleasant weather.” Finlay remarked.

“Capital—capital! You won’t smoke? I know nothing about these cigars; they’re some Grant left behind him—a chimney, that man Grant. Well, Finlay”—he threw himself into the arm-chair on the other side of the hearth—“I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Surely,” said Finlay restively, “it has all been said, sir.”

“No, it has not all been said,” Dr Drummond retorted. “No, it has not. There’s more to be said, and you must hear it, Finlay, with such patience as you have. But I speak the truth when I say that I don’t know how to begin.”

The young man gave him opportunity, gazing silently into the fire. He was hardly aware that Dr Drummond had again left his seat when he started violently at a clap on the shoulder.

“Finlay!” exclaimed the Doctor. “You won’t be offended? No—you couldn’t be offended!”

It was half-jocular, half-anxious, wholly inexplicable.

“At what,” asked Hugh Finlay, “should I be offended?”

Again, with a deep sigh, the Doctor dropped into his chair. “I see I must begin at the beginning,” he said. But Finlay, with sudden intuition, had risen and stood before him trembling, with a hand against the mantelpiece.

“No,” he said, “if you have anything to tell me of importance, for God’s sake begin at the end.”

Some vibration in his voice went straight to the heart of the Doctor, banishing as it travelled, every irrelevant thing that it encountered.

“Then the end is this, Finlay,” he said. “The young woman, Miss Christie Cameron, whom you were so wilfully bound and determined to marry, has thrown you over—that is, if you will give her back her word—has jilted you—that is, if you’ll let her away. Has thought entirely better of the matter.”

(“He stared out of his great sockets of eyes as if the sky had fallen,” Dr Drummond would say, recounting it.)

“For—for what reason?” asked Finlay, hardly yet able to distinguish between the sound of disaster and the sense that lay beneath.

“May I begin at the beginning?” asked the Doctor, and Hugh silently nodded.

(“He sat there and never took his eyes off me, twisting his fingers. I might have been in a confession-box,” Dr Drummond would explain to her.)

“She came here, Miss Cameron, with that good woman, Mrs Kilbannon, it will be three weeks next Monday,” he said, with all the air of beginning a story that would be well worth hearing. “And I wasn’t very well pleased to see her, for reasons that you know. However, that’s neither here nor there. I met them both at the station, and I own to you that I thought when I made Miss Cameron’s acquaintance that you were getting better than you deserved in the circumstances. You were a thousand miles away—now that was a fortunate thing!—and she and Mrs Kilbannon just stayed here and made themselves as comfortable as they could. And that was so comfortable that anyone could see with half an eye”—the Doctor’s own eye twinkled—“so far as Miss Cameron was concerned, that she wasn’t pining in any sense of the word. But I wasn’t sorry for you, Finlay, on that account.” He stopped to laugh enjoyingly, and Finlay blushed like a girl.

“I just let matters bide and went about my own business. Though after poor Mrs Forsyth here—a good woman enough, but the brains of a rabbit—it was pleasant to find these intelligent ladies at every meal, and wonderful how quick they were at picking up the differences between the points of Church administration here and at home. That was a thing I noticed particularly in Miss Cameron.

“Matters went smoothly enough—smoothly enough—till one afternoon that foolish creature Advena Murchison”—Finlay started—“came here to pay a call on Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. It was well and kindly meant, but it was not a wise-like thing to do. I didn’t exactly make it out, but it seems that she came all because of you and on account of you; and the ladies didn’t understand it, and Mrs Kilbannon came to me. My word, but there was a woman to deal with! Who was this young lady, and what was she to you that she should go anywhere or do anything in your name? Without doubt”—he put up a staying hand—“it was foolish of Advena. And what sort of freedom, and how far, and why, and what way, and I tell you it was no easy matter, to quiet her. ‘Is Miss Cameron distressed about it?’ said I. ‘Not a bit,’ said she, ‘but I am, and I must have the rights of this matter,’ said she, ‘if I have to put it to my nephew himself.’

“It was at that point, Finlay, that the idea—just then that the thought came into my mind—well I won’t say absolutely, but practically for the first time—Why can’t this matter be arranged on a basis to suit all parties? So I said to her, ‘Mrs Kilbannon,’ I said, ‘if you had reasonable grounds for it, do you think you could persuade your niece not to marry Hugh Finlay?’ Wait—patience!” He held up his hand, and Finlay gripped the arm of his chair again.

“She just stared at me. ‘Are you gone clean daft, Dr Drummond?’ she said. ‘There could be no grounds serious enough for that. I will not believe that Hugh Finlay has compromised himself in any way.’ I had to stop her; I was obliged to tell her there was nothing of the kind—nothing of the kind; and later on I’ll have to settle with my conscience about that. ‘I meant,’ I said, the reasonable grounds of an alternative: ‘An alternative?’ said she. To cut a long story short,” continued the Doctor, leaning forward, always with the finger in his waistcoat pocket to emphasize what he said, “I represented to Mrs Kilbannon that Miss Cameron was not in sentimental relations toward you, that she had some reason to suspect you of having placed your affections elsewhere, and that I myself was very much taken up with what I had seen of Miss Cameron. In brief, I said to Mrs Kilbannon that if Miss Cameron saw no objection to altering the arrangements to admit of it, I should be pleased to marry her myself. The thing was much more suitable in every way. I was fifty-three years of age last week, I told her, ‘but’ I said, ‘Miss Cameron is thirty-six or seven, if she’s a day, and Finlay there would be like nothing but a grown-up son to her. I can offer her a good home and the minister’s pew in a church that any woman might be proud of—and though far be it from me,’ I said, ‘to depreciate mission work, either home or foreign, Miss Cameron in that field would be little less than thrown away. Think it over,’ I said.

“Well, she was pleased, I could see that. But she didn’t half like the idea of changing the original notion. It was leaving you to your own devices that weighed most with her against it; she’d set her heart on seeing you married with her approval. So I said to her, to make an end of it, ‘Well, Mrs Kilbannon,’ I said, ‘suppose we say no more about it for the present. I think I see the finger of Providence in this matter; but you’ll talk it over with Miss Cameron, and we’ll all just make it, for the next few days, the subject of quiet and sober reflection. Maybe at the end of that time I’ll think better of it myself, though that is not my expectation.’

“‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll just leave it to Christie.’”

As the Doctor went on with his tale, relaxation had stolen dumbly about Finlay’s brow and lips. He dropped from the plane of his own absorption to the humorous common sense of the recital: it claimed and held him with infinite solace. His eyes had something like the light of laughter in them, flashing behind a cloud, as he fixed them on Dr Drummond, and said, “And did you?”

“We did,” said Dr Drummond, getting up once more from his chair, and playing complacently with his watch-charms as he took another turn about the study. “We left it to Miss Cameron, and the result is”—the Doctor stopped sharply and wheeled round upon Finlay—“the result is—why, the upshot seems to be that I’ve cut you out, man!”

Finlay measured the little Doctor standing there twisting his watch-chain, beaming with achieved satisfaction, in a consuming desire to know how far chance had been kind to him, and how far he had to be simply, unspeakably, grateful. He stared in silence, occupied with his great debt; it was like him that that, and not his liberty, should be first in his mind. We who have not his opportunity may find it more difficult to decide; but from our private knowledge of Dr Drummond we may remember what poor Finlay probably forgot at the moment, that even when pitted against Providence, the Doctor was a man of great determination.

The young fellow got up, still speechless, and confronted Dr Drummond. He was troubled for something to say; the chambers of his brain seemed empty or reiterating foolish sounds. He pressed the hand the minister offered him and his lips quivered. Then a light came into his face, and he picked up his hat.

“And I’ll say this for myself,” chuckled Dr Drummond. “It was no hard matter.”

Finlay looked at him and smiled. “It would not be, sir,” he said lamely. Dr Drummond cast a shrewd glance at him and dropped the tone of banter.

“Aye—I know! It’s no joking matter,” he said, and with a hand behind the young man’s elbow, he half pushed him to the door and took out his watch. He must always be starting somebody, something, in the right direction, the Doctor. “It’s not much after half-past nine, Finlay,” he said. “I notice the stars are out.”

It had the feeling of a colloquial benediction, and Finlay carried it with him all the way.

It was nevertheless nearly ten when he reached her father’s house, so late that the family had dispersed for the night. Yet he had the hardihood to ring, and the hour blessed them both, for Advena on the stair, catching who knows what of presage out of the sound, turned, and found him at the threshold herself.