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Title: The Imperialist

Author: Sara Jeannette Duncan
        a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5301]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 25, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IMPERIALIST ***




This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan.





Sara Jeannette Duncan, 1861-1922 (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

The Imperialist

1904




Chapter I

It would have been idle to inquire into the antecedents,
or even the circumstances, of old Mother Beggarlegs. She
would never tell; the children, at all events, were
convinced of that; and it was only the children, perhaps,
who had the time and the inclination to speculate. Her
occupation was clear; she presided like a venerable
stooping hawk, over a stall in the covered part of the
Elgin market-place, where she sold gingerbread horses
and large round gingerbread cookies, and brown sticky
squares of what was known in all circles in Elgin as
taffy. She came, it was understood, with the dawn; with
the night she vanished, spending the interval on a not
improbable broomstick. Her gingerbread was better than
anybody's; but there was no comfort in standing, first
on one foot and then on the other, while you made up your
mind--the horses were spirited and you could eat them a
leg at a time, but there was more in the cookies--she
bent such a look on you, so fierce and intolerant of
vacillation. She belonged to the group of odd characters,
rarer now than they used to be, etched upon the vague
consciousness of small towns as in a way mysterious and
uncanny; some said that Mother Beggarlegs was connected
with the aristocracy and some that she had been "let off"
being hanged. The alternative was allowed full swing,
but in any case it was clear that such persons contributed
little to the common good and, being reticent, were not
entertaining. So you bought your gingerbread, concealing,
as it were, your weapons, paying your copper coins with
a neutral nervous eye, and made off to a safe distance,
whence you turned to shout insultingly, if you were an
untrounced young male of Elgin, "Old Mother Beggarlegs!
Old Mother Beggarlegs!" And why "Beggarlegs" nobody in
the world could tell you. It might have been a dateless
waggery, or it might have been a corruption of some more
dignified surname, but it was all she ever got. Serious,
meticulous persons called her "Mrs" Beggarlegs, slightly
lowering their voices and slurring it, however, it must
be admitted. The name invested her with a graceless,
anatomical interest, it penetrated her wizened black and
derisively exposed her; her name went far indeed to make
her dramatic. Lorne Murchison, when he was quite a little
boy was affected by this and by the unfairness of the
way it singled her out. Moved partly by the oppression
of the feeling and partly by a desire for information he
asked her sociably one day, in the act of purchase, why
the gilt was generally off her gingerbread. He had been
looking long, as a matter of fact, for gingerbread with
the gilt on it, being accustomed to the phrase on the
lips of his father in connection with small profits.
Mother Beggarlegs, so unaccustomed to politeness that
she could not instantly recognize it, answered him with
an imprecation at which he, no doubt, retreated, suddenly
thrown on the defensive hurling the usual taunt. One
prefers to hope he didn't, with the invincible optimism
one has for the behaviour of lovable people; but whether
or not his kind attempt at colloquy is the first indication
I can find of that active sympathy with the disabilities
of his fellow-beings which stamped him later so intelligent
a meliorist. Even in his boy's beginning he had a heart
for the work; and Mother Beggarlegs, but for a hasty
conclusion, might have made him a friend.

It is hard to invest Mother Beggarlegs with importance,
but the date helps me--the date I mean, of this chapter
about Elgin; she was a person to be reckoned with on the
twenty-fourth of May. I will say at once, for the reminder
to persons living in England that the twenty-fourth of
May was the Queen's Birthday. Nobody in Elgin can possibly
have forgotten it. The Elgin children had a rhyme about
it--

   The twenty-fourth of May
      Is the Queen's Birthday;
   If you don't give us a holiday,
      We'll all run away.

But Elgin was in Canada. In Canada the twenty-fourth of
May WAS the Queen's Birthday; and these were times and
regions far removed from the prescription that the
anniversary "should be observed" on any of those various
outlying dates which by now, must have produced in her
immediate people such indecision as to the date upon
which Her Majesty really did come into the world. That
day, and that only, was the observed, the celebrated, a
day with an essence in it, dawning more gloriously than
other days and ending more regretfully, unless, indeed,
it fell on a Sunday when it was "kept" on the Monday,
with a slightly clouded feeling that it wasn't exactly
the same thing. Travelled persons, who had spent the
anniversary there, were apt to come back with a poor
opinion of its celebration in "the old country"--a pleasant
relish to the more-than-ever appreciated advantages of
the new, the advantages that came out so by contrast.
More space such persons indicated, more enterprise they
boasted, and even more loyalty they would flourish, all
with an affectionate reminiscent smile at the little ways
of a grandmother. A "Bank" holiday, indeed! Here it was
a real holiday, that woke you with bells and cannon--who
has forgotten the time the ancient piece of ordnance in
"the Square" blew out all the windows in the Methodist
church?--and went on with squibs and crackers till you
didn't know where to step on the sidewalks, and ended up
splendidly with rockets and fire-balloons and drunken
Indians vociferous on their way to the lock-up. Such a
day for the hotels, with teams hitched three abreast in
front of their aromatic barrooms; such a day for the
circus, with half the farmers of Fox County agape before
the posters--with all their chic and shock they cannot
produce such posters nowadays, nor are there any vacant
lots to form attractive backgrounds--such a day for Mother
Beggarlegs! The hotels, and the shops and stalls for
eating and drinking, were the only places in which business
was done; the public sentiment put universal shutters
up, but the public appetite insisted upon excepting the
means to carnival. An air of ceremonial festivity those
fastened shutters gave; the sunny little town sat round
them, important and significant, and nobody was ever
known to forget that they were up, and go on a fool's
errand. No doubt they had an impressiveness for the young
countryfolk that strolled up and down Main Street in
their honest best, turning into Snow's for ice-cream when
a youth was disposed to treat. (Gallantry exacted ten-cent
dishes, but for young ladies alone, or family parties,
Mrs Snow would bring five-cent quantities almost without
asking, and for very small boys one dish and the requisite
number of spoons.) There was discrimination, there was
choice, in this matter of treating. A happy excitement
accompanied it, which you could read in the way Corydon
clapped his soft felt hat on his head as he pocketed the
change. To be treated--to ten-cent dishes--three times
in the course of the day by the same young man gave matter
for private reflection and for public entertainment,
expressed in the broad grins of less reckless people. I
speak of a soft felt hat, but it might be more than that:
it might be a dark green one, with a feather in it; and
here was distinction, for such a hat indicated that its
owner belonged to the Independent Order of Foresters,
who Would leave their spring wheat for forty miles round
to meet in Elgin and march in procession, wearing their
hats, and dazzlingly scatter upon Main Street. They gave
the day its touch of imagination, those green cocked
hats; they were lyrical upon the highways; along the
prosaic sidewalks by twos and threes they sang together.
It is no great thing, a hat of any quality; but a small
thing may ring dramatic on the right metal, and in the
vivid idea of Lorne Murchison and his sister Advena a
Robin Hood walked in every Independent Forester, especially
in the procession. Which shows the risks you run if you,
a person of honest livelihood and solicited vote, adopt
any portion of a habit not familiar to you. and go marching
about with a banner and a band. Two children may be
standing at the first street corner, to whom your
respectability and your property may at once become
illusion and your outlawry the delightful fact.

A cheap trip brought the Order of Green Hats to Elgin;
and there were cheap trips on this great day to persuade
other persons to leave it. The Grand Trunk had even then
an idea of encouraging social combination for change of
scene, and it was quite a common thing for the operatives
of the Milburn Boiler Company to arrange to get themselves
carried to the lakeside or "the Falls" at half a dollar
a head. The "hands" got it up themselves and it was a
question in Elgin whether one might sink one's dignity
and go as a hand for the sake of the fifty-cent opportunity,
a question usually decided in the negative. The social
distinctions of Elgin may not be easily appreciated by
people accustomed to the rough and ready standards of a
world at the other end of the Grand Trunk; but it will
be clear at a glance that nobody whose occupation prescribed
a clean face could be expected to travel cheek by jowl,
as a privilege, with persons who were habitually seen
with smutty ones, barefaced smut, streaming out at the
polite afternoon hour of six, jangling an empty dinner
pail. So much we may decide, and leave it, reflecting as
we go how simple and satisfactory, after all, are the
prejudices which can hold up such obvious justification.
There was recently to be pointed out in England the heir
to a dukedom who loved stoking, and got his face smutty
by preference. He would have been deplorably subversive
of accepted conventions in Elgin; but, happily or otherwise,
such persons and such places have at present little more
than an imaginative acquaintance, vaguely cordial on the
one side, vaguely critical on the other, and of no
importance in the sum.

Polite society, to return to it, preferred the alternative
of staying at home and mowing the lawn or drinking
raspberry vinegar on its own beflagged verandah; looking
forward in the afternoon to the lacrosse match. There
was nearly always a lacrosse match on the Queen's Birthday,
and it was the part of elegance to attend and encourage
the home team, as well as that of small boys, with broken
straw hats, who sneaked an entrance, and were more
enthusiastic than anyone. It was "a quarter" to get in,
so the spectators were naturally composed of persons who
could afford the quarter, and persons like the young
Flannigans and Finnigans, who absolutely couldn't, but
who had to be there all the same. Lorne and Advena
Murchison never had the quarter, so they witnessed few
lacrosse matches, though they seldom failed to refresh
themselves by a sight of the players after the game when,
crimson and perspiring, but still glorious in striped
jerseys, their lacrosses and running shoes slung over
one shoulder, these heroes left the field.

The Birthday I am thinking of, with Mrs Murchison as a
central figure in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for
dinner, there was a lacrosse match of some importance
for the Fox County Championship and the Fox County Cup
as presented by the Member for the South Riding. Mrs
Murchison remains the central figure, nevertheless, with
her family radiating from her, gathered to help or to
hinder in one of those domestic crises which arose when
the Murchisons were temporarily deprived of a "girl."
Everybody was subject to them in Elgin, everybody had to
acknowledge and face them. Let a new mill be opened, and
it didn't matter what you paid her or how comfortable
you made her, off she would go, and you might think
yourself lucky if she gave a week's warning. Hard times
shut down the mills and brought her back again; but
periods of prosperity were very apt to find the ladies
of Elgin where I am compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison
--in the kitchen. "You'd better get up--the girl's gone,"
Lorne had stuck his head into his sister's room to
announce, while yet the bells were ringing and the rifles
of the local volunteers were spitting out the feu de
joie. "I've lit the fire an' swep' out the dining-room.
You tell mother. Queen's Birthday, too--I guess Lobelia's
about as mean as they're made!" And the Murchisons had
descended to face the situation. Lorne had by then done
his part, and gone out into the chromatic possibilities
of the day; but the sense of injury he had communicated
to Advena in her bed remained and expanded. Lobelia, it
was felt. had scurvily manipulated the situation--her
situation, it might have been put, if any Murchison had
been in the temper for jesting. She had taken unjustifiable
means to do a more unjustifiable thing, to secure for
herself an improper and unlawful share of the day's
excitements, transferring her work, by the force of
circumstances, to the shoulders of other people since,
as Mrs Murchison remarked, somebody had to do it. Nor
had she her mistress testified the excuse of fearing
unreasonable confinement. "I told her she might go when
she had done her dishes after dinner," said Mrs Murchison,
"and then she had only to come back at six and get
tea--what's getting tea? I advised her to finish her
ironing yesterday, so as to be free of it today; and she
said she would be very glad to. Now, I wonder if she DID
finish it!" and Mrs Murchison put down her pan of potatoes
with a thump to look in the family clothes basket. "Not
she! Five shirts and ALL the coloured things. I call it
downright deceit!"

"I believe I know the reason she'll SAY," said Advena.
"She objects to rag carpet in her bedroom. She told me so."

"Rag carpet--upon my word!" Mrs Murchison dropped her
knife to exclaim. "It's what her betters have to do with!
I've known the day when that very piece of rag carpet--
sixty balls there were in it and every one I sewed with
my own fingers--was the best I had for my spare room,
with a bit of ingrain in the middle. Dear me!" she went
on with a smile that lightened the whole situation, "how
proud I was of that performance! She didn't tell ME she
objected to rag carpet!"

"No, Mother," Advena agreed, "she knew better."

They were all there in the kitchen, supporting their
mother, and it seems an opportunity to name them. Advena,
the eldest, stood by the long kitchen table washing the
breakfast cups in "soft" soap and hot water. The soft
soap--Mrs Murchison had a barrelful boiled every spring
in the back yard, an old colonial economy she hated to
resign--made a fascinating brown lather with iridescent
bubbles. Advena poured cupfuls of it from on high to see
the foam rise, till her mother told her for mercy's sake
to get on with those dishes. She stood before a long low
window, looking out into the garden and the light,
filtering through apple branches on her face showed her
strongly featured and intelligent for fourteen. Advena
was named after one grandmother; when the next girl came
Mrs Murchison, to make an end of the matter, named it
Abigail, after the other. She thought both names outlandish
and acted under protest, but hoped that now everybody
would be satisfied. Lorne came after Advena, at the period
of a naive fashion of christening the young sons of Canada
in the name of her Governor-General. It was a simple way
of attesting a loyal spirit, but with Mrs Murchison more
particular motives operated. The Marquis of Lorne was
not only the deputy of the throne, he was the son-in-law
of a good woman of whom Mrs Murchison thought more, and
often said it, for being the woman she was than for being
twenty times a Queen; and he had made a metrical translation
of the Psalms, several of which were included in the
revised psalter for the use of the Presbyterian Church
in Canada, from which the whole of Knox Church sang to
the praise of God every Sunday. These were circumstances
that weighed with Mrs Murchison, and she called her son
after the Royal representative, feeling that she was
doing well for him in a sense beyond the mere bestowal
of a distinguished and a euphonious name, though that,
as she would have willingly acknowledged, was "well enough
in its place."

We must take this matter of names seriously; the Murchisons
always did. Indeed, from the arrival of a new baby until
the important Sunday of the christening. nothing was
discussed with such eager zest and such sustained interest
as the name he should get--there was a fascinating list
at the back of the dictionary--and to the last minute it
was problematical. In Stella's case, Mrs Murchison actually
changed her mind on the way to church; and Abby, who had
sat through the sermon expecting Dorothy Maud, which she
thought lovely, publicly cried with disappointment. Stella
was the youngest, and Mrs Murchison was thankful to have
a girl at last whom she could name without regard to her
own relations or anybody else's. I have skipped about a
good deal, but I have only left out two, the boys who
came between Abby and Stella. In their names the
contemporary observer need not be too acute to discover
both an avowal and to some extent an enforcement of Mr
Murchison's political views; neither an Alexander Mackenzie
nor an Oliver Mowat could very well grow up into anything
but a sound Liberal in that part of the world without
feeling himself an unendurable paradox. To christen a
baby like that was, in a manner, a challenge to public
attention; the faint relaxation about the lips of Dr
Drummond--the best of the Liberals himself, though he
made a great show of keeping it out of the pulpit--
recognized this, and the just perceptible stir of the
congregation proved it. Sonorously he said it. "Oliver
Mowat, I baptize thee in the Name of the Father--" The
compliment should have all the impressiveness the rite
could give it, while the Murchison brothers and sisters,
a-row in the family pew, stood on one foot with excitement
as to how Oliver Mowat would take the drops that defined
him. The verdict was, on the way home, that he behaved
splendidly. Alexander Mackenzie, the year before, had
roared.

He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but
very copiously, behind the woodpile. His father had
finally cuffed him for importunity; and the world was no
place for a just boy, who asked nothing but his rights.
Only the woodpile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood
inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black
circumstances; and his tears fell among the lichens of
the stump he was bowed on till, observing them, he began
to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a pond
there, and was presently disappointed to find the source
exhausted. The Murchisons were all imaginative.

The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still "tormented."
Poor Alec's rights--to a present of pocket-money on the
Queen's Birthday--were common ones, and almost statutory.
How their father, sitting comfortably with his pipe in
the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin,
reading the Toronto paper, could evade his liability in
the matter was unfathomable to the Murchisons; it was
certainly illiberal; they had a feeling that it was
illegal. A little teasing was generally necessary, but
the resistance today had begun to look ominous and Alec,
as we know, too temerarious, had retired in disorder to
the woodpile.

Oliver was wiping Advena's dishes. He exercised himself
ostentatiously upon a plate, standing in the door to be
within earshot of his father.

"Eph Wheeler," he informed his family, "Eph Wheeler, he's
got twenty-five cents, an' a English sixpence, an' a
Yankee nickel. An' Mr Wheeler's only a common working
man, a lot poorer'n we are."

Mr Murchison removed his pipe from his lips in order,
apparently, to follow unimpeded the trend of the Dominion's
leading article. Oliver eyed him anxiously. "Do, Father,"
he continued in logical sequence. "Aw do."

"Make him, Mother," said Abby indignantly. "It's the
Queen's BIRTHDAY!"

"Time enough when the butter bill's paid," said Mrs
Murchison.

"Oh the BUTTER bill! Say, Father, aren't you going to?"

"What?" asked John Murchison, and again took out his
pipe, as if this were the first he had heard of the
matter.

"Give us our fifteen cents each to celebrate with. You
can't do it under that," Oliver added firmly. "Crackers
are eight cents a packet this year, the small size."

"Nonsense," said Mr Murchison. The reply was definite
and final, and its ambiguity was merely due to the fact
that their father disliked giving a plump refusal.
"Nonsense" was easier to say, if not to hear than "No."
Oliver considered for a moment, drew Abby to colloquy by
the pump, and sought his brother behind the woodpile.
Then he returned to the charge.

"Look here, Father," he said, "CASH DOWN, we'll take
ten."

John Murchison was a man of few words, but they were
usually impregnated with meaning, especially in anger.
"No more of this," he said. "Celebrate fiddlesticks! Go
and make yourselves of some use. You'll get nothing from
me, for I haven't got it." So saying, he went through
the kitchen with a step that forbade him to be followed.
His eldest son, arriving over the backyard fence in a
state of heat, was just in time to hear him. Lorne's
apprehension of the situation was instant, and his face
fell, but the depression plainly covered such splendid
spirits that his brother asked resentfully, "Well, what's
the matter with YOU?"

"Matter? Oh, not much. I'm going to see the Cayugas beat
the Wanderers, that's all; an' Abe Mackinnon's mother
said he could ask me to come back to tea with them. Can
I, Mother?"

"There's no objection that I know of," said Mrs Murchison,
shaking her apron free of stray potato-parings, "but you
won't get money for the lacrosse match or anything else
from your father today, _I_ can assure you. They didn't
do five dollars worth of business at the store all day
yesterday, and he's as cross as two sticks."

"Oh, that's all right." Lorne jingled his pocket and
Oliver took a fascinated step toward him. "I made thirty
cents this morning, delivering papers for Fisher. His
boy's sick. I did the North Ward--took me over'n hour.
Guess I can go all right, can't I?"

"Why, yes, I suppose you can," said his mother. The others
were dumb. Oliver hunched his shoulders and kicked at
the nearest thing that had paint on it. Abby clung to
the pump handle and sobbed aloud. Lorne looked gloomily
about him and went out. Making once more for the back
fence, he encountered Alexander in the recognized family
retreat. "Oh, my goodness!" he said, and stopped. In a
very few minutes he was back in the kitchen, followed
sheepishly by Alexander, whose grimy face expressed the
hope that beat behind his little waistcoat.

"Say, you kids," he announced, "Alec's got four cents,
an' he says he'll join up. This family's going to celebrate
all right. Come on down town."

No one could say that the Murchisons were demonstrative.
They said nothing, but they got their hats. Mrs Murchison
looked up from her occupation.

"Alec," she said, "out of this house you don't go till
you've washed your face. Lorne, come here," she added in
a lower voice, producing a bunch of keys. "If you look
in the right-hand corner of the top small drawer in my
bureau you'll find about twenty cents. Say nothing about
it, and mind you don't meddle with anything else. I guess
the Queen isn't going to owe it all to you."




Chapter II

"We've seen changes, Mr Murchison. Aye. We've seen
changes."

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison stood together in the store
door, over which the sign "John Murchison: Hardware,"
had explained thirty years of varying commercial fortune.
They had pretty well begun life together in Elgin. John
Murchison was one of those who had listened to Mr Drummond's
trial sermon, and had given his vote to "call" him to
the charge. Since then there had been few Sundays when,
morning and evening, Mr Murchison had not been in his
place at the top of his pew, where his dignified and
intelligent head appeared with the isolated significance
of a strong individuality. People looked twice at John
Murchison in a crowd; so did his own children at home.
Hearing some discussion of the selection of a premier,
Alec, looking earnestly at him once said, "Why don't they
tell Father to be it?" The young minister looked twice
at him that morning of the trial sermon, and asked
afterward who he was. A Scotchman, Mr Drummond was told,
not very long from the old country, who had bought the
Playfair business on Main Street, and settled in the
"Plummer Place," which already had a quarter of a century's
standing in the annals of the town. The Playfair business
was a respectable business to buy; the Plummer Place,
though it stood in an unfashionable outskirt, was a
respectable place to settle in; and the minister, in
casting his lot in Elgin, envisaged John Murchison as
part of it, thought of him confidently as a "dependance,"
saw him among the future elders and office-bearers of
the congregation, a man who would be punctual with his
pew-rent, sage in his judgements, and whose views upon
church attendance would be extended to his family.

So the two came, contemporaries, to add their labour and
their lives to the building of this little outpost of
Empire. It was the frankest transfer, without thought of
return; they were there to spend and be spent within the
circumference of the spot they had chosen, with no ambition
beyond. In the course of nature, even their bones and
their memories would enter into the fabric. The new
country filled their eyes; the new town was their
opportunity, its destiny their fate. They were altogether
occupied with its affairs, and the affairs of the growing
Dominion, yet obscure in the heart of each of them ran
the undercurrent of the old allegiance. They had gone
the length of their tether, but the tether was always
there. Thus, before a congregation that always stood in
the early days, had the minister every Sunday morning
for thirty years besought the Almighty, with ardour and
humility, on behalf of the Royal Family. It came in the
long prayer, about the middle. Not in the perfunctory
words of a ritual, but in the language of his choice,
which varied according to what he believed to be the
spiritual needs of the reigning House, and was at one
period, touching certain of its members, though respectful,
extremely candid. The General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland, "now in session," also--was it ever forgotten
once? And even the Prime Minister, "and those who sit in
council with him," with just a hint of extra commendation
if it happened to be Mr Gladstone. The minister of Knox
Church, Elgin, Ontario, Canada, kept his eye on them all.
Remote as he was, and concerned with affairs of which
they could know little, his sphere of duty could never
revolve too far westward to embrace them, nor could his
influence, under any circumstances, cease to be at their
disposal. It was noted by some that after Mr Drummond
had got his D.D. from an American University he also
prayed occasionally for the President of the neighbouring
republic; but this was rebutted by others, who pointed
out that it happened only on the occurrence of
assassinations, and held it reasonable enough. The
cavillers mostly belonged to the congregation of St
Andrew's, "Established"--a glum, old-fashioned lot
indeed--who now and then dropped in of a Sunday evening
to hear Mr Drummond preach. (There wasn't much to be said
for the preaching at St Andrew's.) The Established folk
went on calling the minister of Knox Church "Mr" Drummond
long after he was "Doctor" to his own congregation, on
account of what they chose to consider the dubious source
of the dignity; but the Knox Church people had their own
theory to explain this hypercriticism. and would promptly
turn the conversation to the merits of the sermon.

Twenty-five years it was, in point, this Monday morning
when the Doctor--not being Established we need not
hesitate, besides by this time nobody did--stood with Mr
Murchison in the store door and talked about having seen
changes. He had preached his anniversary sermon the night
before to a full church when, laying his hand upon his
people's heart, he had himself to repress tears. He was
aware of another strand completed in their mutual bond:
the sermon had been a moral, an emotional, and an oratorical
success; and in the expansion of the following morning
Dr Drummond had remembered that he had promised his
housekeeper a new gas cooking-range, and that it was high
time he should drop into Murchison's to inquire about
it. Mrs Forsyth had mentioned at breakfast that they had
ranges with exactly the improvement she wanted at
Thompson's, but the minister was deaf to the hint. Thompson
was a Congregationalist and, improvement or no improvement,
it wasn't likely that Dr Drummond was going "outside the
congregation" for anything he required. It would have
been on a par with a wandering tendency in his flock,
upon which he systematically frowned. He was as great an
autocrat in this as the rector of any country parish in
England undermined by Dissent; but his sense of obligation
worked unfailingly both ways.

John Murchison had not said much about the sermon; it
wasn't his way, and Dr Drummond knew it. "You gave us a
good sermon last night, Doctor"; not much more than that,
and "I noticed the Milburns there; we don't often get
Episcopalians"; and again, "The Wilcoxes"--Thomas Wilcox,
wholesale grocer, was the chief prop of St Andrew's--"were
sitting just in front of us. We overtook them going home,
and Wilcox explained how much they liked the music. 'Glad
to see you,' I said. 'Glad to see you for any reason,'"
Mr Murchison's eye twinkled. "But they had a great deal
to say about 'the music.'" It was not an effusive form
of felicitation; the minister would have liked it less
if it had been, felt less justified, perhaps, in remembering
about the range on that particular morning. As it was,
he was able to take it with perfect dignity and good
humour, and to enjoy the point against the Wilcoxes with
that laugh of his that did everybody good to hear; so
hearty it was, so rich in the grain of the voice, so full
of the zest and flavour of the joke. The range had been
selected, and their talk of changes had begun with it,
Mr Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler and
Dr Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that
burned wood and stood on its four legs, with nothing
behind but the stove pipe, and if you wanted a boiler
you took off the front lids and put it on, and how
remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from
the conservative kitchen notions of the old country. He
had come, unhappily, a widower to the domestic improvements
on the other side of the Atlantic. "Often I used to
think," he said to Mr Murchison, "if my poor wife could
have seen that stove how delighted she would have been!
But I doubt this would have been too much for her
altogether!"

"That stove!" answered Mr Murchison. "Well I remember
it. I sold it myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart,
for thirty dollars--the last purchase he ever made, poor
man. It was great business for me--I had only two others
in the store like it. One of them old Milburn bought--the
father of this man, d'ye mind him?--the other stayed by
me a matter of seven years. I carried a light stock in
those days."

It was no longer a light stock. The two men involuntarily
glanced round them for the satisfaction of the contrast
Murchison evoked, though neither of them, from motives
of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell upon it. John
Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial
success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation
toward the prosperity of a member had in some degree the
embarrassment of a tax-gatherer's. The stock was indeed
heavy now. You had to go upstairs to see the ranges,
where they stood in rows, and every one of them bore
somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison's
name. Through the windows came the iterating ring on the
iron from the foundry in Chestnut Street which fed the
shop, with an overflow that found its way from one end
of the country to the other. Finicking visitors to Elgin
found this wearing, but to John Murchison it was the
music that honours the conqueror of circumstances. The
ground floor was given up to the small wares of the
business, chiefly imported; two or three young men, steady
and knowledgeable-looking, moved about in their shirt
sleeves among shelves and packing-cases. One of them was
our friend Alec; our other friend Oliver looked after
the books at the foundry. Their father did everything
deliberately; but presently, in his own good time, his
commercial letter paper would be headed, with regard to
these two, "John Murchison and Sons." It had long announced
that the business was "Wholesale and Retail."

Dr Drummond and Mr Murchison, considering the changes in
Elgin from the store door, did it at their leisure, the
merchant with his thumbs thrust comfortably in the armholes
of his waistcoat, the minister, with that familiar trick
of his, balancing on one foot and suddenly throwing his
slight weight forward on the other. "A bundle of nerves,"
people called the Doctor: to stand still would have been
a penance to him; even as he swayed backward and forward
in talking, his hand must be busy at the seals on his
watch chain and his shrewd glance travelling over a dozen
things you would never dream so clever a man would take
notice of. It was a prospect of moderate commercial
activity they looked out upon, a street of mellow shopfronts
on both sides, of varying height and importance, wearing
that air of marking a period, a definite stop in growth,
that so often coexists with quite a reasonable degree of
activity and independence in colonial towns. One could
almost say, standing there in the door at Murchison's,
where the line of legitimate enterprise had been overpassed
and where its intention had been none too sanguine--on
the one hand in the faded, and pretentious red brick
building with the false third storey, occupied by Cleary
which must have been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything
else; on the other hand in the solid "Gregory block,"
opposite the market, where rents were as certain as the
dividends of the Bank of British North America.

Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of
growing and doing business, it had always found the days
long enough. Drays passed through it to the Grand Trunk
station, but they passed one at a time; a certain number
of people went up and down about their affairs, but they
were never in a hurry; a street car jogged by every ten
minutes or so, but nobody ran after it. There was a decent
procedure; and it was felt that Bofield--he was dry-goods,
too--in putting in an elevator was just a little
unnecessarily in advance of the times. Bofield had only
two storeys, like everybody else, and a very easy staircase,
up which people often declared they preferred to walk
rather than wait in the elevator for a young man to finish
serving and work it. These, of course, were the
sophisticated people of Elgin; countryfolk, on a market
day, would wait a quarter of an hour for the young man
and think nothing of it; and I imagine Bofield found his
account in the elevator, though he did complain sometimes
that such persons went up and down on frivolous pretexts
or to amuse the baby. As a matter of fact, Elgin had
begun as the centre of "trading" for the farmers of Fox
County, and had soon over-supplied that limit in demand;
so that when other interests added themselves to the
activity of the town there was still plenty of room for
the business they brought. Main Street was really,
therefore, not a fair index; nobody in Elgin would have
admitted it. Its appearance and demeanour would never
have suggested that it was now the chief artery of a
thriving manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute,
eleven churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for the
deaf and dumb, to say nothing of a fire department
unsurpassed for organization and achievement in the
Province of Ontario. Only at twelve noon it might be
partly realized when the prolonged "toots" of seven
factory whistles at once let off, so to speak, the hour.
Elgin liked the demonstration; it was held to be cheerful
and unmistakable, an indication of "go-ahead" proclivities
which spoke for itself. It occurred while yet Dr Drummond
and Mr Murchison stood together in the store door.

"I must be getting on," said the minister, looking at
his watch. "And what news have you of Lorne?"

"Well, he seems to have got through all right."

"What--you've heard already, then?"

"He telegraphed from Toronto on Saturday night." Mr
Murchison stroked his chin, the better to retain his
satisfaction. "Waste of money--the post would have brought
it this morning--but it pleased his mother. Yes, he's
through his Law Schools examination, and at the top, too,
as far as I can make out."

"Dear me, and you never mentioned it!" Dr Drummond spoke
with the resigned impatience of a familiar grievance. It
was certainly a trying characteristic of John Murchison
that he never cared about communicating anything that
might seem to ask for congratulation. "Well, well! I'm
very glad to hear it."

"It slipped my mind," said Mr Murchison. "Yes, he's
full-fledged 'barrister and solicitor' now; he can plead
your case or draw you up a deed with the best of them.
Lorne's made a fair record, so far. We've no reason to
be ashamed of him."

"That you have not." Personal sentiments between these
two Scotchmen were indicated rather than indulged. "He's
going in with Fulke and Warner, I suppose--you've got
that fixed up?"

"Pretty well. Old man Warner was in this morning to talk
it over. He says they look to Lorne to bring them in
touch with the new generation. It's a pity he lost that
son of his."

"Oh, a great pity. But since they had to go outside the
firm they couldn't have done better; they couldn't have
done better. I hope Lorne will bring them a bit of Knox
Church business too; there's no reason why Bob Mackintosh
should have it all. They'll be glad to see him back at
the Hampden Debating Society. He's a great light there,
is Lorne; and the Young Liberals, I hear are wanting him
for chairman this year."

"There's some talk of it. But time enough--time enough
for that! He'll do first-rate if he gets the law to
practise, let alone the making of it."

"Maybe so; he's young yet. Well, good morning to you.
I'll just step over the way to the Express office and
get a proof out of them of that sermon of mine. I noticed
their reporter fellow--what's his name?--Rawlins, with
his pencil out last night, and I've no faith in Rawlins."

"Better cast an eye over it," responded Mr Murchison
cordially, and stood for a moment or two longer in the
door watching the crisp, significant little figure of
the minister as he stepped briskly over the crossing to
the newspaper office. There Dr Drummond sat down, before
he explained his errand, and wrote a paragraph.

"We are pleased to learn," it ran "that Mr Lorne Murchison,
eldest son of Mr John Murchison, of this town, has passed
at the capital of the Province his final examination in
Law, distinguishing himself by coming out at the top of
the list. It will be remembered that Mr Murchison, upon
entering the Law Schools, also carried off a valuable
scholarship. We are glad to be able to announce that Mr
Murchison, Junior, will embark upon his profession in
his native town, where he will enter the well-known firm
of Fulke and Warner."

The editor, Mr Horace Williams, had gone to dinner, and
Rawlins was out so Dr Drummond had to leave it with the
press foreman. Mr Williams read it appreciatively on his
return, and sent it down with the following addition:

"This is doing it as well as it can be done. Elgin
congratulates Mr L. Murchison upon having produced these
results, and herself upon having produced Mr L. Murchison."




Chapter III

From the day she stepped into it Mrs Murchison knew that
the Plummer Place was going to be the bane of her existence.
This may have been partly because Mr Murchison had bought
it, since a circumstance welded like that into one's life
is very apt to assume the character of a bane, unless
one's temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs
Murchison's didn't. But there were other reasons more
difficult to traverse: it was plainly true that the place
did require a tremendous amount of "looking after," as
such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking
after than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They
could never have afforded, in the beginning, to possess
it had it not been sold, under mortgage, at a dramatic
sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair, built
of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs
compassing the four sides of it, as they often did in
days when the builder had only to turn his hand to the
forest. It stood on the very edge of the town; wheatfields
in the summer billowed up to its fences, and corn-stacks
in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army.
The plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took
the road or, if you were so inclined, the river, into
which you could throw a stone from the orchard of the
Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in
ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a
shrubbery at each side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable
garden, the whole intersected by winding gravel walks,
of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that a man might
do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the
middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with
a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable
and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden
of Italy sloping to the sea. There was also a barn with
stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a
lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison
often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and
she hoped he had the money to live up to them. The
Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a
succession of "girls" left on account of the milking,
and the lane was useful as an approach to the backyard
by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter. It
was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order
to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances
which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison
often declared that she could put up with the grounds if
it had stopped there. It did not stop there. Though I
was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison in the kitchen,
she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a
cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble
mantelpiece. She had an icehouse and a wine cellar, and
a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with
every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune
that not one of them was in order. She had far too much,
as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing
family, and if the ceiling was not dropping in the
drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library or
the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah
wanted reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not
to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it
was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop. The
barn was definitely outside the radius of possible
amelioration--it passed gradually, visibly, into
decrepitude, and Mrs Murchison often wished she could
afford to pull it down.

It may be realized that in spite of its air of being
impossible to "overtake"--I must, in this connection,
continue to quote its mistress--there was an attractiveness
about the dwelling of the Murchisons the attractiveness
of the large ideas upon which it had been built and
designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced
income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous
view to economy and occupation, to perish of the
readjustment. The case of such persons, when they arrive,
is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local
understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be
entitled to respect, but nothing can save them from the
isolation of their difference and their misapprehension.
It was like that with the house. The house was admired--
without enthusiasm--but it was not copied. It was felt
to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious;
and it wore its superiority in the popular view like a
folly. It was in Elgin, but not of it: it represented a
different tradition; and Elgin made the same allowance
for its bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities as
was conceded to its original master's habit of a six-o'clock
dinner, with wine.

The architectural expression of the town was on a different
scale, beginning with "frame," rising through the
semidetached, culminating expensively in Mansard roofs,
cupolas and modern conveniences, and blossoming, in
extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk portieres
for interior decoration. The Murchison house gained by
force of contrast: one felt, stepping into it, under
influences of less expediency and more dignity, wider
scope and more leisured intention; its shabby spaces had
a redundancy the pleasanter and its yellow plaster cornices
a charm the greater for the numerous close-set examples
of contemporary taste in red brick which made, surrounded
by geranium beds, so creditable an appearance in the West
Ward. John Murchison in taking possession of the house
had felt in it these satisfactions, had been definitely
penetrated and soothed by them, the more perhaps because
he brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier
things of life which circumstances had not previously
developed. He seized the place with a sense of opportunity
leaping sharp and conscious out of early years in the
grey "wynds" of a northern Scottish town; and its
personality sustained him, very privately but none the
less effectively, through the worry and expense of it
for years. He would take his pipe and walk silently for
long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening,
for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts
in flower; and he never opened the hall door without a
feeling of gratification in its weight as it swung under
his hand. In so far as he could, he supplemented the
idiosyncrasies he found. The drawing-room walls, though
mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper--lavender
and gilt, a grape-vine pattern--held a few good engravings;
the library was reduced to contain a single bookcase,
but it was filled with English classics. John Murchison
had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the
discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books. He
bought them between long periods of abstinence, during
which he would scout the expenditure of an unnecessary
dollar, coming home with a parcel under his arm for which
he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose
itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe.
Mrs Murchison kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases;
and when her husband brought home Chambers's Dictionary
of English Literature, after shortly and definitely
repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new
winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all
endurance. Mrs Murchison was surrounded, indeed, by more
of "that sort of thing" than she could find use or excuse
for; since, though books made but a sporadic appearance,
current literature, daily, weekly, and monthly, was
perpetually under her feet. The Toronto paper came as a
matter of course, as the London daily takes its morning
flight into the provinces, the local organ as simply
indispensable, the Westminster as the corollary of church
membership and for Sunday reading. These were constant,
but there were also mutables--Once a Week, Good Words
for the Young, Blackwood's, and the Cornhill they used
to be; years of back numbers Mrs Murchison had packed
away in the attic, where Advena on rainy days came into
the inheritance of them, and made an early acquaintance
with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner's Pride,
while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious
hours on The Back of the North Wind. Their father considered
such publications and their successors essential, like
tobacco and tea. He was also an easy prey to the
subscription agent, for works published in parts and paid
for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded
with abhorrence. So much so that when John put his name
down for Masterpieces of the World's Art, which was to
cost twenty dollars by the time it was complete, he
thought it advisable to let the numbers accumulate at
the store.

Whatever the place represented to their parents, it was
pure joy to the young Murchisons. It offered a margin
and a mystery to life. They saw it far larger than it
was; they invested it, arguing purely by its difference
from other habitations, with a romantic past. "I guess
when the Prince of Wales came to Elgin, Mother, he stayed
here," Lorne remarked, as a little boy. Secretly he and
Advena took up boards in more than one unused room, and
rapped on more than one thick wall to find a hollow
chamber; the house revealed so much that was interesting,
it was apparent to the meanest understanding that it must
hide even more. It was never half lighted, and there was
a passage in which fear dwelt--wild were the gallopades
from attic to cellar in the early nightfall, when every
young Murchison tore after every other, possessed, like
cats, by a demoniac ecstasy of the gloaming. And the
garden, with the autumn moon coming over the apple trees
and the neglected asparagus thick for ambush, and a casual
untrimmed boy or two with the delicious recommendation
of being utterly without credentials, to join in the rout
and be trusted to make for the back fence without further
hint at the voice of Mrs Murchison--these were joys of
the very fibre, things to push ideas and envisage life
with an attraction that made it worth while to grow up.

And they had all achieved it--all six. They had grown up
sturdily, emerging into sobriety and decorum by much the
same degrees as the old house, under John Murchison's
improving fortunes, grew cared for and presentable. The
new roof went on, slate replacing shingles, the year Abby
put her hair up; the bathroom was contemporary with
Oliver's leaving school; the electric light was actually
turned on for the first time in honour of Lorne's return
from Toronto, a barrister and solicitor; several rooms
had been done up for Abby's wedding. Abby had married,
early and satisfactorily, Dr Harry Johnson, who had
placidly settled down to await the gradual succession of
his father's practice; "Dr Harry and Dr Henry" they were
called. Dr Harry lived next door to Dr Henry, and had a
good deal of the old man's popular manner. It was an
unacknowledged partnership, which often provided two
opinions for the same price; the town prophesied well of
it. That left only five at home, but they always had Abby
over in the West Ward, where Abby's housekeeping made an
interest and Abby's baby a point of pilgrimage. These
considerations almost consoled Mrs Murchison declaring,
as she did, that all of them might have gone but Abby,
who alone knew how to be "any comfort or any dependence"
in the house; who could be left with a day's preserving;
and I tell you that to be left by Mrs Murchison with a
day's preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons
or pears, was a mark of confidence not easy to obtain.
Advena never had it; Advena, indeed, might have married
and removed no prop of the family economy. Mrs Murchison
would have been "sorry for the man"--she maintained a
candour toward and about those belonging to her that
permitted no illusions--but she would have stood cheerfully
out of the way on her own account. When you have seen
your daughter reach and pass the age of twenty-five
without having learned properly to make her own bed, you
know without being told that she will never be fit for
the management of a house--don't you? Very well then.
And for ever and for ever, no matter what there was to
do, with a book in her hand--Mrs Murchison would put an
emphasis on the "book" which scarcely concealed a contempt
for such absorption. And if, at the end of your patience,
you told her for any sake to put it down and attend to
matters, obeying in a kind of dream that generally drove
you to take the thing out of her hands and do it yourself,
rather than jump out of your skin watching her.

Sincerely Mrs Murchison would have been sorry for the
man if he had arrived, but he had not arrived. Advena
justified her existence by taking the university course
for women at Toronto, and afterward teaching the English
branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate Institute,
which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic
criticism. Mrs Murchison was thankful to have her there
--outside--where little more could reasonably be expected
of her than that she should be down in time for breakfast.
It is so irritating to be justified in expecting more
than seems likely to come. Mrs Murchison's ideas circulated
strictly in the orbit of equity and reason; she expected
nothing from anybody that she did not expect from herself;
indeed, she would spare others in far larger proportion.
But the sense of obligation which led her to offer herself
up to the last volt of her energy made her miserable when
she considered that she was not fairly done by in return.
Pressed down and running over were the services she
offered to the general good, and it was on the ground of
the merest justice that she required from her daughters
"some sort of interest" in domestic affairs. From her
eldest she got no sort of interest, and it was like the
removal of a grievance from the hearth when Advena took
up employment which ranged her definitely beyond the
necessity of being of any earthly use in the house.
Advena's occupation to some extent absorbed her
shortcomings, which was much better than having to
attribute them to her being naturally "through-other,"
or naturally clever, according to the bias of the moment.
Mrs Murchison no longer excused or complained of her
daughter; but she still pitied the man.

"The boys," of course, were too young to think of matrimony.
They were still the boys, the Murchison boys; they would
be the boys at forty if they remained under their father's
roof. In the mother country, men in short jackets and
round collars emerge from the preparatory schools; in
the daughter lands boys in tailcoats conduct serious
affairs. Alec and Oliver, in the business, were frivolous
enough as to the feminine interest. For all Dr Drummond's
expressed and widely known views upon the subject, it
was a common thing for one or both of these young men to
stray from the family pew on Sunday evenings to the
services of other communions, thereafter to walk home in
the dusk under the maples with some attractive young
person, and be sedately invited to finish the evening on
her father's verandah. Neither of them was guiltless of
silk ties knitted or handkerchiefs initialled by certain
fingers; without repeating scandal, one might say by
various fingers. For while the ultimate import of these
matters was not denied in Elgin, there was a general
feeling against giving too much meaning to them, probably
originating in a reluctance among heads of families to
add to their responsibilities. These early spring
indications were belittled and laughed at; so much so
that the young people them selves hardly took them
seriously, but regarded them as a form of amusement almost
conventional. Nothing would have surprised or embarrassed
them more than to learn that their predilections had an
imperative corollary, that anything should, of necessity,
"come of it." Something, of course, occasionally did come
of it; and, usually after years of "attention," a young
man of Elgin found himself mated to a young woman, but
never under circumstances that could be called precipitate
or rash. The cautious blood and far sight of the early
settlers, who had much to reckon with, were still
preponderant social characteristics of the town they
cleared the site for. Meanwhile, however, flowers were
gathered, and all sorts of evanescent idylls came and
went in the relations of young men and maidens. Alec and
Oliver Murchison were already in the full tide of them.

From this point of view they did not know what to make
of Lorne. It was not as if their brother were in any way
ill calculated to attract that interest which gave to
youthful existence in Elgin almost the only flavour that
it had. Looks are looks, and Lorne had plenty of them;
taller by an inch than Alec, broader by two than Oliver,
with a fine square head and blue eyes in it, and features
which conveyed purpose and humour, lighted by a certain
simplicity of soul that pleased even when it was not
understood. "Open," people said he was, and "frank"--so
he was, frank and open, with horizons and intentions;
you could see them in his face. Perhaps it was more
conscious of them than he was. Ambition, definitely
shining goals, adorn the perspectives of young men in
new countries less often than is commonly supposed. Lorne
meant to be a good lawyer, squarely proposed to himself
that the country should hold no better; and as to more
selective usefulness, he hoped to do a little stumping
for the right side when Frank Jennings ran for the Ontario
House in the fall. It wouldn't be his first electioneering:
from the day he became chairman of the Young Liberals
the party had an eye on him, and when occasion arose,
winter or summer, by bobsleigh or buggy, weatherbeaten
local bosses would convey him to country schoolhouses
for miles about to keep a district sound on railway
policy, or education, or tariff reform. He came home
smiling with the triumphs of these occasions, and offered
them, with the slow, good-humoured, capable drawl that
inspired such confidence in him, to his family at breakfast,
who said "Great!" or "Good for you, Lorne!" John Murchison
oftenest said nothing, but would glance significantly at
his wife, frowning and pursing his lips when she, who
had most spirit of them all, would exclaim, "You'll be
Premier yet, Lorne!" It was no part of the Murchison
policy to draw against future balances: they might believe
everything, they would express nothing; and I doubt
whether Lorne himself had any map of the country he meant
to travel over in that vague future, already defining in
local approbation, and law business coming freely in with
a special eye on the junior partner. But the tract was
there, subconscious, plain in the wider glance, the
alerter manner; plain even in the grasp and stride which
marked him in a crowd; plain, too, in the preoccupation
with other issues, were it only turning over a leader in
the morning's Dominion, that carried him along indifferent
to the allurements I have described. The family had a
bond of union in their respect for Lorne, and this absence
of nugatory inclinations in him was among its elements.
Even Stella who, being just fourteen, was the natural
mouthpiece of family sentiment, would declare that Lorne
had something better to do than go hanging about after
girls, and for her part she thought all the more of him
for it.




Chapter IV

"I am requested to announce," said Dr Drummond after the
singing of the last hymn, "the death, yesterday morning,
of James Archibald Ramsay, for fifteen years an adherent
and for twenty-five years a member of this church. The
funeral will take place from the residence of the deceased,
on Court House Street, tomorrow afternoon at four o'clock.
Friends and acquaintances are respectfully--invited--to
attend."

The minister's voice changed with the character of its
affairs. Still vibrating with the delivery of his sermon,
it was now charged with the official business of the
interment. In its inflections it expressed both elegy
and eulogy; and in the brief pause before and after
"invited" and the fall of "attend" there was the last
word of comment upon the mortal term. A crispation of
interest passed over the congregation; every chin was
raised. Dr Drummond's voice had a wonderful claiming
power, but he often said he wished his congregation would
pay as undivided attention to the sermon as they did to
the announcements.

"The usual weekly prayer meeting will be held in the
basement of the church on Wednesday evening." Then almost
in a tone of colloquy, and with just a hint of satire
about his long upper lip--

"I should be glad to see a better attendance of the young
people at these gatherings. Time was when the prayer
meeting counted among our young men and women as an
occasion not to be lightly passed over. In these days it
would seem that there is too much business to be done,
or too much pleasure to be enjoyed, for the oncoming
generation to remember their weekly engagement with the
Lord. This is not as it should be; and I rely upon the
fathers and mothers of this congregation, who brought
these children in their arms to the baptismal font, there
to be admitted to the good hopes and great privileges of
the Church of God--I rely upon them to see that there
shall be no departure from the good old rule, and that
time is found for the weekly prayer meeting."

Mrs Murchison nudged Stella, who returned the attention,
looking elaborately uninterested, with her foot. Alec
and Oliver smiled consciously; their father, with an
expression of severe gravity, backed up the minister who,
after an instant's pause, continued--

"On Tuesday afternoon next, God willing, I shall visit
the following families in the East Ward--Mr Peterson, Mr
Macormack, Mrs Samuel Smith, and Mr John Flint. On Thursday
afternoon in the South Ward, Mrs Reid, Mr P. C. Cameron,
and Mr Murchison. We will close by singing the Third
Doxology: Blessed, blessed be Jehovah, Israel's God to
all eternity--"

The congregation trooped out; the Murchisons walked home
in a clan, Mr and Mrs Murchison, with Stella skirting
the edge of the sidewalk beside them, the two young men
behind. Abby, when she married Harry, had "gone over" to
the Church of England. The wife must worship with the
husband; even Dr Drummond recognized the necessity, though
he professed small opinion of the sway of the spouse who,
with Presbyterian traditions behind her, could not achieve
union the other way about; and Abby's sanctioned defection
was a matter of rather shame-faced reference by her
family. Advena and Lorne had fallen into the degenerate
modern habit of preferring the evening service.

"So we're to have the Doctor on Thursday," said Mrs
Murchison, plainly not displeased. "Well, I hope the
dining-room carpet will be down."

"I expect he'll be wanting his tea," replied Mr Murchison.
"He's got you in the right place on the list for that,
Mother--as usual."

"I'd just like to see him go anywhere else for his tea
the day he was coming to our house," declared Stella.
"But he GENERALLY has too much sense."

"You boys," said Mrs Murchison, turning back to her sons,
"will see that you're on hand that evening. And I hope
the Doctor will rub it in about the prayer meeting." Mrs
Murchison chuckled. "I saw it went home to both of you,
and well it might. Yes, I think I may as well expect him
to tea. He enjoys my scalloped oysters, if I do say it
myself."

"We'll get Abby over," said Mr Murchison. "That'll please
the Doctor."

"I must say," remarked Stella, "he seems to think a lot
more of Abby now that she's Mrs Episcopal Johnson."

"Yes, Abby and Harry must come," said Mrs Murchison, "and
I was thinking of inviting Mr and Mrs Horace Williams.
We've been there till I'm ashamed to look them in the
face. And I've pretty well decided," she added
autocratically, "to have chicken salad. So if Dr Drummond
has made up his mouth for scalloped oysters he'll be
disappointed."

"Mother," announced Stella, "I'm perfectly certain you'll
have both."

"I'll consider it," replied her mother. "Meanwhile we
would be better employed in thinking of what we have been
hearing. That's the third sermon from the Book of Job in
six weeks. I must say, with the whole of the two Testaments
to select from, I don't see why the Doctor should be so
taken up with Job."

Stella was vindicated; Mrs Murchison did have both. The
chicken salad gleamed at one end of the table and the
scalloped oysters smoked delicious at the other. Lorne
had charge of the cold tongue and Advena was entrusted
with the pickled pears. The rest of the family were
expected to think about the tea biscuits and the cake,
for Lobelia had never yet had a successor that was any
hand with company. Mrs Murchison had enough to do to pour
out the tea. It was a table to do anybody credit, with
its glossy damask and the old-fashioned silver and best
china that Mrs Murchison had brought as a bride to her
housekeeping--for, thank goodness, her mother had known
what was what in such matters--a generous attractive
table that you took some satisfaction in looking at. Mrs
Murchison came of a family of noted housekeepers; where
she got her charm I don't know. Six-o'clock tea, and that
the last meal in the day, was the rule in Elgin, and a
good enough rule for Mrs Murchison, who had no patience
with the innovation of a late dinner recently adopted by
some people who could keep neither their servants nor
their digestions in consequence. It had been a crisp
October day; as Mr Murchison remarked, the fall evenings
were beginning to draw in early; everybody was glad of
the fire in the grate and the closed curtains. Dr Drummond
had come about five, and the inquiries and comments upon
family matters that the occasion made incumbent had been
briskly exchanged, with just the word that marked the
pastoral visit and the practical interest that relieved
it. And he had thought, on the whole, that he might manage
to stay to tea, at which Mrs Murchison's eyes twinkled
as she said affectionately--

"Now, Doctor, you know we could never let you off."

Then Abby had arrived and her husband, and finally Mr
and Mrs Williams, just a trifle late for etiquette, but
well knowing that it mustn't be enough to spoil the
biscuits. Dr Drummond in the place of honour, had asked
the blessing, and that brief reminder of the semiofficial
character of the occasion having been delivered, was in
the best of humours. The Murchisons were not far wrong
in the happy divination that he liked coming to their
house. Its atmosphere appealed to him; he expanded in
its humour, its irregularity, its sense of temperament.
They were doubtful allurements, from the point of view
of a minister of the Gospel, but it would not occur to
Dr Drummond to analyse them. So far as he was aware, John
Murchison was just a decent, prosperous, Christian man,
on whose word and will you might depend, and Mrs Murchison
a stirring, independent little woman, who could be very
good company when she felt inclined. As to their sons
and daughters, in so far as they were a credit, he was
as proud of them as their parents could possibly be,
regarding himself as in a much higher degree responsible
for the formation of their characters and the promise of
their talents. And indeed, since every one of them had
"sat under" Dr Drummond from the day he or she was capable
of sitting under anybody, Mr and Mrs Murchison would have
been the last to dispute this. It was not one of those
houses where a pastor could always be sure of leaving
some spiritual benefit behind; but then he came away
himself with a pleasant sense of nervous stimulus which
was apt to take his mind off the matter. It is not given
to all of us to receive or to extend the communion of
the saints; Mr and Mrs Murchison were indubitably of the
elect, but he was singularly close-mouthed about it, and
she had an extraordinary way of seeing the humorous
side--altogether it was paralysing, and the conversation
would wonderfully soon slip round to some robust secular
subject, public or domestic. I have mentioned Dr Drummond's
long upper lip; all sorts of racial virtues resided there,
but his mouth was also wide and much frequented by a
critical, humorous, philosophical smile which revealed
a view of life at once kindly and trenchant. His shrewd
grey eyes were encased in wrinkles, and when he laughed
his hearty laugh they almost disappeared in a merry line.
He had a fund of Scotch stories, and one or two he was
very fond of, at the expense of the Methodists, that were
known up and down the Dominion, and nobody enjoyed them
more than he did himself. He had once worn his hair in
a high curl on his scholarly forehead, and a silvering
tuft remained brushed upright; he took the old-fashioned
precaution of putting cotton wool in his ears, which gave
him more than ever the look of something highly concentrated
and conserved but in no way detracted from his dignity.
St Andrew's folk accused him of vanity because of the
diamond he wore on his little finger. He was by no means
handsome, but he was intensely individual; perhaps he
had vanity; his people would have forgiven him worse
things. And at Mrs Murchison's tea party he was certainly,
as John Murchison afterward said, "in fine feather."

An absorbing topic held them, a local topic, a topic
involving loss and crime and reprisals. The Federal Bank
had sustained a robbery of five thousand dollars. and in
the course of a few days had placed their cashier under
arrest for suspected complicity. Their cashier was Walter
Ormiston, the only son of old Squire Ormiston, of Moneida
Reservation, ten miles out of Elgin, who had administered
the affairs of the Indians there for more years than the
Federal Bank had existed. Mr Williams brought the latest
news, as was to be expected; news flowed in rivulets to
Mr Williams all day long; he paid for it, dealt in it,
could spread or suppress it.

"They've admitted the bail," Mr Williams announced, with
an air of self-surveillance. Rawlins had brought the
intelligence in too late for the current issue, and Mr
Williams was divided between his human desire to communicate
and his journalistic sense that the item would be the
main feature of the next afternoon's Express.

"I'm glad of that. I'm glad of that," repeated Dr Drummond.
"Thank you, Mrs Murchison, I'll send my cup. And did you
learn, Williams, for what amount?"

Mr Williams ran his hand through his hair in the effort
to remember, and decided that he might as well let it
all go. The Mercury couldn't fail to get it by tomorrow
anyhow.

"Three thousand," he said. "Milburn and Dr Henry Johnson."

"I thought Father was bound to be in it," remarked Dr
Harry.

"Half and half?" asked John Murchison.

"No," contributed Mrs Williams. "Mr Milburn two and Dr
Henry one. Mr Milburn is Walter's uncle, you know."

Mr Williams fastened an outraged glance on his wife, who
looked another way. Whatever he thought proper to do, it
was absolutely understood that she was to reveal nothing
of what "came in," and was even carefully to conserve
anything she heard outside with a view to bringing it
in. Mrs Williams was too prone to indiscretion in the
matter of letting news slip prematurely; and as to its
capture, her husband would often confess, with private
humour, that Minnie wasn't much of a mouser.

"Well, that's something to be thankful for," said Mrs
Murchison. "I lay awake for two hours last night thinking
of that boy in jail, and his poor old father, seventy-nine
years of age, and such a fine old man, so thoroughly
respected."

"I don't know the young fellow," said Dr Drummond. "but
they say he's of good character, not over-solid, but
bears a clean reputation. They're all Tories together,
of course, the Ormistons."

"It's an old U. E. Loyalist family," remarked Advena.
"Mr Ormiston has one or two rather interesting Revolutionary
trophies at his house out there."

"None the worse for that. None the worse for that," said
Dr Drummond.

"Old Ormiston's father," contributed the editor of the
Express, "had a Crown grant of the whole of Moneida
Reservation at one time. Government actually bought it
back from him to settle the Indians there. He was a
well-known Family Compact man, and fought tooth and nail
for the Clergy Reserves in 'fifty."

"Well, well," said Dr Drummond, with a twinkle. "We'll
hope young Ormiston is innocent, nevertheless."

"Nasty business for the Federal Bank if he is," Mr Williams
went on. "They're a pretty unpopular bunch as it is."

"Of course he's innocent," contributed Stella, with
indignant eyes; "and when they prove it, what can he do
to the bank for taking him up? That's what I want to
know."

Her elders smiled indulgently. "A lot you know about it,
kiddie," said Oliver. It was the only remark he made
during the meal. Alec passed the butter assiduously, but
said nothing at all. Adolescence was inarticulate in
Elgin on occasions of ceremony.

"I hear they've piled up some big evidence," said Mr
Williams. "Young Ormiston's been fool enough to do some
race-betting lately. Minnie, I wish you'd get Mrs Murchison
to show you how to pickle pears. Of course," he added,
"they're keeping it up their sleeve."

"It's a hard place to keep evidence," said Lorne Murchison
at last with a smile which seemed to throw light on the
matter. They had all been waiting, more or less consciously,
for what Lorne would have to say.

"Lorne, you've got it!" divined his mother instantly.

"Got what, Mother?"

"The case! I've suspected it from the minute the subject
was mentioned! That case came in today!"

"And you sitting there like a bump on a log, and never
telling us!" exclaimed Stella, with reproach.

"Stella, you have a great deal too much to say," replied
her brother. "Suppose you try sitting like a bump on a
log. We won't complain. Yes, the Squire seems to have
made up his mind about the defence, and my seniors haven't
done much else today."

"Rawlins saw him hitched up in front of your place for
about two hours this morning," said Mr Williams. "I told
him I thought that was good enough, but we didn't say
anything, Rawlins having heard it was to be Flynn from
Toronto. And I hadn't forgotten the Grand Trunk case we
put down to you last week without exactly askin'. Your
old man was as mad as a hornet--wanted to stop his
subscription; Rawlins had no end of a time to get round
him. Little things like that will creep in when you've
got to trust to one man to run the whole local show. But
I didn't want the Mercury to have another horse on us."

"Do you think you'll get a look in, Lorne?" asked Dr
Harry.

"Oh, not a chance of it. The old man's as keen as a razor
on the case, and you'd think Warner never had one before!
If I get a bit of grubbing to do, under supervision,
they'll consider I ought to be pleased." It was the
sunniest possible tone of grumbling; it enlisted your
sympathy by its very acknowledgement that it had not a
leg to stand on.

"They're pretty wild about it out Moneida way," said Dr
Harry. "My father says the township would put down the
bail three times over."

"They swear by the Squire out there," said Mr Horace
Williams, liberally applying his napkin to his moustache.
"He treated some of them more than square when the fall
wheat failed three years running, about ten years back;
do you remember, Mr Murchison? Lent them money at about
half the bank rate, and wasn't in an awful sweat about
getting it in at that either."

"And wasn't there something about his rebuilding the
school-house at his own expense not so long ago?" asked
Dr Drummond.

"Just what he did. I wanted to send Rawlins out and make
a story of it--we'd have given it a column, with full
heads; but the old man didn't like it. It's hard to know
what some people will like. But it was my own foolishness
for asking. A thing like that is public property."

"There's a good deal of feeling," said Lorne. "So much
that I understand the bank is moving for change of venue."

"I hope they won't get it," said Dr Drummond sharply. "A
strong local feeling is valuable evidence in a case like
this. I don't half approve this notion that a community
can't manage its own justice when it happens to take an
interest in the case. I've no more acquaintance with
the Squire than 'How d'ye do?' and I don't know his son
from Adam; but I'd serve on the jury tomorrow if the
Crown asked it, and there's many more like me."

Mr Williams, who had made a brief note on his shirt cuff,
restored his pencil to his waistcoat pocket. "I shall
oppose a change of venue," said he.




Chapter V

It was confidently expected by the Murchison family that
when Stella was old enough she would be a good deal in
society. Stella, without doubt, was well equipped for
society; she had exactly those qualities which appealed
to it in Elgin, among which I will mention two--the
quality of being able to suggest that she was quite as
good as anybody without saying so, and the even more
important quality of not being any better. Other things
being equal--those common worldly standards that prevailed
in Elgin as well as anywhere else in their degree--other
things being equal, this second simple quality was perhaps
the most important of all. Mr and Mrs Murchison made no
claim and small attempt upon society. One doubts whether,
with children coming fast and hard times long at the
door, they gave the subject much consideration; but if
they did, it is highly unlikely to have occurred to them
that they were too good for their environment. Yet in a
manner they were. It was a matter of quality, of spiritual
and mental fabric; they were hardly aware that they had
it, but it marked them with a difference, and a difference
is the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably
to scan its own intelligible averages, will not tolerate.
The unusual may take on an exaggeration of these; an
excess of money, an excess of piety, is understood; but
idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is
regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow,
modified among law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation.
It is a sound enough social principle to distrust that
which is not understood, like the strain of temperament
inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons. Such
a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius,
emancipated from the common interests, possibly inimical
to the general good; and when, later on, your genius
takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he has and
gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd
nods before the vindicating fact.

Nobody knew it at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons'
case. They had produced nothing abnormal, but they had
to prove that they weren't going to, and Stella was the
last and most convincing demonstration. Advena, bookish
and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was
out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and
enthusiasms. Once as a little girl she had taken a papoose
from a drunken squaw and brought it home for her mother
to adopt. Mrs Murchison's reception of the suggested duty
may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances--a
trick like that! The inevitable hour arrived when she
should be instructed on the piano, and the second time
the music teacher came her pupil was discovered on the
roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after her.
She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point
of vantage informed her family that it was a waste of
money. She would hide in the hayloft with a novel; she
would be off by herself in a canoe at six o'clock in the
morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy
October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along
in front of her "in a dream." No one could dream with
impunity in Elgin, except in bed. Mothers of daughters
sympathized in good set terms with Mrs Murchison. "If
that girl were mine--" they would say, and leave you with
a stimulated notion of the value of corporal punishment.
When she took to passing examinations and teaching, Elgin
considered that her parents ought to be thankful in the
probability that she had escaped some dramatic end. But
her occupation further removed her from intercourse with
the town's more exclusive circles: she had taken a definite
line, and she pursued it, preoccupied. If she was a brand
snatched from the burning, she sent up a little curl of
reflection in a safe place, where she was not further
interrupted.

Abby, inheriting all these prejudices, had nevertheless
not done so badly; she had taken no time at all to
establish herself; she had almost immediately married.
In the social estimates of Elgin the Johnsons were "nice
people," Dr Henry was a fine old figure in the town, and
Abby's chances were good enough. At all events, when she
opened her doors as a bride, receiving for three afternoons
in her wedding dress. everybody had "called." It was very
distinctly understood, of course, that this was a civility
that need not lead to anything whatever, a kind of bowing
recognition, to be formally returned and quite possibly
to end there. With Abby, in a good many cases, it hadn't
ended there; she was doing very well, and as she often
said with private satisfaction, if she went out anywhere
she was just as likely as not to meet her brothers. Elgin
society, shaping itself, I suppose, to ultimate increase
and prosperity, had this peculiarity, that the females
of a family, in general acceptance, were apt to lag far
behind the males. Alec and Oliver enjoyed a good deal of
popularity, and it was Stella's boast that if Lorne didn't
go out much it needn't be supposed he wasn't asked. It
was an accepted state of things in Elgin that young men
might be invited without their sisters, implying an
imperturbability greater than London's, since London may
not be aware of the existence of sisters, while Elgin
knew all sorts of more interesting things about them.
The young men were more desirable than the young women;
they forged ahead, carrying the family fortunes, and the
"nicest" of them were the young men in the banks. Others
might be more substantial, but there was an allure about
a young man in a bank as difficult to define as to resist.
To say of a certain party-giver that she had "about every
bank clerk in town" was to announce the success of her
entertainment in ultimate terms. These things are not
always penetrable, but no doubt his gentlemanly form of
labour and its abridgement in the afternoons, when other
young men toiled on till the stroke of six, had something
to do with this apotheosis of the bank clerk, as well as
his invariable taste in tailoring, and the fact that some
local family influence was probably represented in his
appointment. Privilege has always its last little
stronghold, and it still operates to admiration on the
office stools of minor finance in towns like Elgin. At
all events, the sprouting tellers and cashiers held
unquestioned sway--young doctors and lawyers simply didn't
think of competing; and since this sort of thing carries
its own penalty, the designation which they shared with
so many distinguished persons in history became a byword
on the lips of envious persons and small boys, by which
they wished to express effeminacy and the substantive of
the "stuck-up." "D'ye take me fur a bank clurk?" was a
form of repudiation among corner loafers as forcible as
it was unjustifiable.

I seem to have embarked, by way of getting to the Milburns'
party--there is a party at the Milburns' and some of us
are going--upon an analysis of social principles in Elgin,
an adventure of difficulty, as I have once or twice
hinted, but one from which I cannot well extricate myself
without at least leaving a clue or two more for the use
of the curious. No doubt these rules had their nucleus
in the half-dozen families, among whom we may count the
shadowy Plummers, who took upon themselves for Fox County,
by the King's pleasure, the administration of justice,
the practice of medicine and of the law, and the performance
of the charges of the Church of England a long time ago.
Such persons would bring their lines of demarcation with
them, and in their new milieu of backwoods settlers and
small traders would find no difficulty in drawing them
again. But it was a very long time ago. The little knot
of gentry-folk soon found the limitations of their new
conditions; years went by in decades, aggrandizing none
of them. They took, perforce, to the ways of the country,
and soon nobody kept a groom but the Doctor, and nobody
dined late but the Judge. There came a time when the
Sheriff's whist club and the Archdeacon's port became a
tradition to the oldest inhabitant. Trade flourished,
education improved, politics changed. Her Majesty removed
her troops--the Dominion wouldn't pay, a poor-spirited
business--and a bulwark went with the regiment. The
original dignified group broke, dissolved, scattered.
Prosperous traders foreclosed them, the spirit of the
times defeated them, young Liberals succeeded them in
office. Their grandsons married the daughters of well-to-do
persons who came from the north of Ireland, the east of
Scotland, and the Lord knows where. It was a sorry tale
of disintegration with a cheerful sequel of rebuilding,
leading to a little unavoidable confusion as the edifice
went up. Any process of blending implies confusion to
begin with; we are here at the making of a nation.

This large consideration must dispose of small anomalies,
such as the acceptance, without cant, of certain forms
of the shop, euphemized as the store, but containing the
same old vertebral counter. Not all forms. Dry-goods were
held in respect and chemists in comparative esteem; house
furnishings and hardware made an appreciable claim, and
quite a leading family was occupied with seed grains.
Groceries, on the other hand, were harder to swallow,
possibly on account of the apron, though the grocer's
apron, being of linen, had several degrees more
consideration than the shoemaker's, which was of leather;
smaller trades made smaller pretensions; Mrs Milburn
could tell you where to draw the line. They were all
hard-working folk together, but they had their little
prejudices: the dentist was known as "Doc," but he was
not considered quite on a medical level; it was doubtful
whether you bowed to the piano-tuner, and quite a curious
and unreasonable contempt was bound up in the word
"veterinary." Anything "wholesale" or manufacturing stood,
of course, on its own feet; there was nothing ridiculous
in molasses, nothing objectionable in a tannery, nothing
amusing in soap. Such airs and graces were far from Elgin,
too fundamentally occupied with the amount of capital
invested, and too profoundly aware how hard it was to
come by. The valuable part of it all was a certain bright
freedom, and this was of the essence. Trade was a decent
communal way of making a living, rooted in independence
and the general need; it had none of the meaner aspects.
Your bow was negligible to the piano-tuner, and everything
veterinary held up its head. And all this again qualified,
as everywhere, by the presence or absence of the social
faculty, that magnetic capacity for coming, as Mrs
Murchison would say, "to the fore," which makes little
of disadvantages that might seem insuperable and, in
default, renders null and void the most unquestionable
claims. Anyone would think of the Delarues. Mr Delarue
had in the dim past married his milliner, yet the Delarues
were now very much indeed to the fore. And, on the other
hand, the Leverets of the saw mills, rich and benevolent;
the Leverets were not in society simply, if you analysed
it, because they did not appear to expect to be in it.
Certainly it was well not to be too modest; assuredly,
as Mrs Murchison said, you put your own ticket on, though
that dear soul never marked herself in very plain figures,
not knowing, perhaps for one thing, quite how much she
was worth. On the other hand, "Scarce of company, welcome
trumpery," Mrs Murchison always emphatically declared to
be no part of her social philosophy. The upshot was that
the Murchisons were confined to a few old friends and
looked, as we know, half-humorously, half-ironically,
for more brilliant excursions, to Stella and "the boys."

It was only, however, the pleasure of Mr Lorne Murchison's
company that was requested at the Milburns' dance. Almost
alone among those who had slipped into wider and more
promiscuous circles with the widening of the stream, the
Milburns had made something like an effort to hold out.
The resisting power was not thought to reside in Mr
Milburn, who was personally aware of no special ground
for it, but in Mrs Milburn and her sister, Miss Filkin,
who seemed to have inherited the strongest ideas. in the
phrase of the place, about keeping themselves to themselves.
A strain of this kind is sometimes constant, even so far
from the fountainhead, with its pleasing proof that such
views were once the most general and the most sacred
defence of middle-class firesides, and that Thackeray
had, after all, a good deal to excuse him. Crossing the
Atlantic they doubtless suffered some dilution; but all
that was possible to conserve them under very adverse
conditions Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin made it their duty
to do. Nor were these ideas opposed, contested, or much
traversed in Elgin. It was recognized that there was
"something about" Mrs Milburn and her sister--vaguely
felt--that you did not come upon that thinness of nostril,
and slope of shoulder, and set of elbow at every corner.
They must have got it somewhere. A Filkin tradition
prevailed, said to have originated in Nova Scotia: the
Filkins never had been accessible, but if they wanted to
keep to themselves, let them. In this respect Dora Milburn,
the only child, was said to be her mother's own daughter.
The shoulders, at all events, testified to it; and the
young lady had been taught to speak, like Mrs Milburn,
with what was known as an "English accent." The accent
in general use in Elgin was borrowed--let us hope
temporarily--from the other side of the line. It suffered
local modifications and exaggerations, but it was clearly
an American product. The English accent was thoroughly
affected, especially the broad "a." The time may come
when Elgin will be at considerable pains to teach itself
the broad "a," but that is in the embroidery of the
future, and in no way modifies the criticism of Dora
Milburn.

Lorne Murchison, however, was invited to the dance. The
invitation reached him through the post: coming home from
office early on Saturday he produced it from his pocket.
Mrs Murchison and Abby sat on the verandah enjoying the
Indian summer afternoon; the horse chestnuts dropped
crashing among the fallen leaves, the roadside maples
blazed, the quiet streets ran into smoky purple, and one
belated robin hopped about the lawn. Mrs Murchison had
just remarked that she didn't know why, at this time of
year, you always felt as if you were waiting for something.

"Well, I hope you feel honoured," remarked Abby. Not one
of them would have thought that Lorne should feel especially
honoured; but the insincerity was so obvious that it
didn't matter. Mrs Murchison, cocking her head to read
the card, tried hard not to look pleased.

"Mrs Milburn. At Home," she read. "Dancing. Well she
might be at home dancing, for all me! Why couldn't she
just write you a little friendly note, or let Dora do
it? It's that Ormiston case," she went on shrewdly. "They
know you're taking a lot of trouble about it. And the
least they could do, too."

Lorne sat down on the edge of the verandah with his hands
in his trousers pockets, and stuck his long legs out in
front of him. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "They have
the name of being nifty, but I haven't got anything
against the Milburns."

"Name!" ejaculated Mrs Murchison. "Now long ago was it
the Episcopalians began that sewing-circle business for
the destitute clergy of Saskatchewan?"

"Mother!" put in Abby, with deprecation.

"Well, I won't be certain about the clergy, but I tell
you it had to do with Saskatchewan, for that I remember!
And anyhow, the first meeting was held at the Milburns'
--members lent their drawing-rooms. Well, Mrs Leveret
and Mrs Delarue went to the meeting--they were very thick
just then, the Leverets and the Delarues. They were so
pleased to be going that they got there about five minutes
too soon, and they were the first to come. Well, they
rang the bell and in they went. The girl showed them into
the front drawing-room and asked them to sit down. And
there in the back drawing-room sat Mrs Milburn and Miss
Filkin, AND NEVER SPOKE TO THEM! Took not the smallest
notice, any more than if they had been stray cats--not
so much! Their own denomination, mind you, too! And
there they might have been sitting still if Mrs Leveret
hadn't had the spirit to get up and march out. No thank
you. No Milburns for me."

Lorne watched his mother with twinkling eyes till she
finished.

"Well, Mother, after that, if it was going to be a sewing
circle I think I'd send an excuse," he said, "but maybe
they won't be so mean at a dance."




Chapter VI

Octavius Milburn would not, I think, have objected to
being considered, with relation to his own line in life,
a representative man. He would have been wary to claim
it, but if the stranger had arrived unaided at this view
of him, he would have been inclined to think well of the
stranger's power of induction. That is what he was--a
man of averages, balances, the safe level, no more disposed
to an extravagant opinion than to wear one side whisker
longer than the other. You would take him any day,
especially on Sunday in a silk hat, for the correct
medium: by his careful walk with the spring in it, his
shrewd glance with the caution in it, his look of being
prepared to account for himself, categorically, from head
to foot. He was fond of explaining, in connection with
an offer once made him to embark his capital in Chicago,
that he preferred a fair living under his own flag to a
fortune under the Stars and Stripes. There we have the
turn of his mind, convertible into the language of
bookkeeping, a balance struck, with the profit on the
side of the flag, the patriotic equivalent in good sound
terms of dollars and cents. With this position understood,
he was prepared to take you up on any point of comparison
between the status and privileges of a subject and a
citizen--the political MORALE of a monarchy and a
republic--the advantage of life on this and the other
side of the line. There was nothing he liked better to
expatiate upon, with that valuable proof of his own
sincerity always at hand for reference and illustration.
His ideal was life in a practical, go-ahead, self-governing
colony, far enough from England actually to be disabused
of her inherited anachronisms and make your own tariff,
near enough politically to keep your securities up by
virtue of her protection. He was extremely satisfied with
his own country; one saw in his talk the phenomenon of
patriotism in double bloom, flower within flower. I have
mentioned his side whiskers: he preserved that facial
decoration of the Prince Consort; and the large steel
engraving that represents Queen Victoria in a flowing
habit and the Prince in a double-breasted frock coat and
a stock, on horseback, hung over the mantelpiece in his
drawing-room. If the outer patriotism was a little vague,
the inner had vigour enough. Canada was a great place.
Mr Milburn had been born in the country, and had never
"gone over" to England; Canada was good enough for him.
He was born, one might say, in the manufacturing interest,
and inherited the complacent and Conservative political
views of a tenderly nourished industry. Mr Milburn was
of those who were building up the country; with sufficient
protection he was prepared to go on doing it long and
loyally; meanwhile he admired the structure from all
points of view. As President of the Elgin Chamber of
Commerce, he was enabled once a year to produce no end
of gratifying figures; he was fond of wearing on such
occasions the national emblem in a little enamelled maple
leaf; and his portrait and biography occupied a full page
in a sumptuous work entitled Canadians of Today, sold by
subscription, where he was described as the "Father of
the Elgin Boiler."

Mr and Mrs Milburn were in the drawing-room to receive
their young guests, a circumstance which alone imparted
a distinction to the entertainment. At such parties the
appearance of the heads of the house was by no means
invariable; frequently they went to bed. The simple
explanation was that the young people could stand late
hours and be none the worse next day; their elders had
to be more careful if they wanted to get down to business.
Moreover, as in all new societies, between the older and
the younger generation there was a great gulf fixed,
across which intercourse was difficult. The sons and
daughters, born to different circumstances, evolved their
own conventions, the old people used the ways and manners
of narrower days; one paralysed the other. It might be
gathered from the slight tone of patronage in the address
of youth to age that the advantage lay with the former;
but polite conversation, at best, was sustained with
discomfort. Such considerations, however, were far from
operating with the Milburns. Mrs Milburn would have said
that they were characteristic of quite a different class
of people; and so they were.

No one would have supposed, from the way in which the
family disposed itself in the drawing-room, that Miss
Filkin had only just finished making the claret cup, or
that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till the last
minute, or that Mrs Milburn had been obliged to have a
distinct understanding with the maid--Mrs Milburn's
servants were all "maids," even the charwoman, who had
buried three husbands--on the subject of wearing a cap
when she answered the door. Mrs Milburn sat on a chair
she had worked herself, occupied with something in the
new stitch; Dora performed lightly at the piano; Miss
Filkin dipped into Selections from the Poets of the
Century, placed as remotely as possible from the others;
Mr Milburn, with his legs crossed, turned and folded a
Toronto evening paper. Mrs Milburn had somewhat objected
to the evening paper in the drawing-room. "Won't you look
at a magazine, Octavius?" she said; but Mr Milburn advanced
the argument that it removed "any appearance of stiffness,"
and prevailed. It was impossible to imagine a group more
disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party
among some classes of people; indeed, when Mr Lorne
Murchison arrived--like the unfortunate Mrs Leveret and
Mrs Delarue, he was the first--they looked almost surprised
to see him.

Lorne told his mother afterward that he thought, in that
embarrassing circumstance, of Mrs Leveret and Mrs Delarue,
and they laughed consumedly together over his discomforture;
but what he felt at the moment was not the humour of the
situation. To be the very first and solitary arrival is
nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in Elgin a
kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed
for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A
young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow
for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to
escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so
walked. Our young man was potentially capable of not
minding, by next morning he didn't mind; but immediately
he was fast tied in the cobwebs of the common prescription,
and he made his way to each of the points of the compass
of the Milburns' drawing-room to shake hands, burning to
the ears. Before he subsided into a chair near Mr Milburn
he grasped the collar of his dress coat on each side and
drew it forward, a trick he had with his gown in court,
a nervous and mechanical action. Dora, who continued to
play, watched him over the piano with an amusement not
untinged with malice. She was a tall fair girl, with
several kinds of cleverness. She did her hair quite
beautifully, and she had a remarkable, effective, useful
reticence. Her father declared that Dora took in a great
deal more than she ever gave out--an accomplishment, in
Mr Milburn's eyes, on the soundest basis. She looked
remarkably pretty and had remarkably good style, and as
she proceeded with her mazurka she was thinking, "He has
never been asked here before: how perfectly silly he must
feel coming so early!" Presently as Lorne grew absorbed
in talk and forgot his unhappy chance, she further
reflected, "I don't think I've ever seen him till now in
evening dress; it does make him a good figure." This went
on behind a faultless coiffure and an expression almost
classical in its detachment; but if Miss Milburn could
have thought on a level with her looks I, for one, would
hesitate to take any liberty with her meditations.

However, the bell began to ring with the briefest
intermissions, the maid in the cap to make constant
journeys. She opened the door with a welcoming smile,
having practically no deportment to go with the cap:
human nature does not freeze readily anywhere. Dora had
to leave the piano: Miss Filkin decided that when fifteen
had come she would change her chair. Fifteen soon came,
the young ladies mostly in light silks or muslins cut
square, not low, in the neck, with half-sleeves. This
moderation was prescribed in Elgin, where evening dress
was more a matter of material than of cut, a thing in
itself symbolical if it were desirable to consider social
evolution here. For middle-aged ladies high necks and
long sleeves were usual; and Mrs Milburn might almost
have been expected to appear thus, in a nicely made black
broche, perhaps. It was recognized as like Mrs Milburn,
in keeping with her unbending ideas, to wear a dress cut
as square as any young lady's, with just a little lace
let in, of a lavender stripe. The young men were nearly
all in the tailor's convention for their sex the world
over, with here and there a short coat that also went to
church; but there some departures from orthodoxy in the
matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were
achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed
of defending them from the charge of being ready-made.

It was a clear, cold January night and everybody, as
usual, walked to the party; the snow creaked and ground
underfoot, one could hear the arriving steps in the
drawing-room. They stamped and scraped to get rid of it
in the porch, and hurried through the hall, muffled
figures in overshoes, to emerge from an upstairs bedroom
radiant, putting a last touch to hair and button hole,
smelling of the fresh winter air. Such gatherings usually
consisted entirely of bachelors and maidens, with one or
two exceptions so recently yoked together that they had
not yet changed the plane of existence; married people,
by general consent, left these amusements to the unculled.
They had, as I have hinted, more serious preoccupations,
"something else to do"; nobody thought of inviting them.
Nobody, that is, but Mrs Milburn and a few others of her
way of thinking, who saw more elegance and more propriety
in a mixture. On this occasion she had asked her own
clergyman, the pleasant-faced rector of St Stephen's,
and Mrs Emmett, who wore that pathetic expression of
fragile wives and mothers who have also a congregation
at their skirts. Walter Winter was there, too. Mr Winter
had the distinction of having contested South Fox in the
Conservative interest three time unsuccessfully. Undeterred,
he went on contesting things: invariably beaten, he
invariably came up smiling and ready to try again. His
imperturbability was a valuable asset; he never lost
heart or dreamed of retiring from the arena, nor did he
ever cease to impress his party as being their most useful
and acceptable representative. His business history was
chequered and his exact financial equivalent uncertain,
but he had tremendously the air of a man of affairs; as
the phrase went, he was full of politics, the plain
repository of deep things. He had a shrewd eye, a double
chin, and a bluff, crisp, jovial manner of talking as he
lay back in an armchair with his legs crossed and played
with his watch chain, an important way of nodding assent,
a weighty shake of denial. Voting on purely party lines,
the town had later rewarded his invincible expectation
by electing him Mayor, and then provided itself with
unlimited entertainment by putting in a Liberal majority
on his council, the reports of the weekly sittings being
constantly considered as good as a cake walk. South Fox,
as people said, was not a healthy locality for
Conservatives. Yet Walter Winter wore a look of remarkable
hardiness. He had also tremendously the air of a dark
horse, the result both of natural selection and careful
cultivation. Even his political enemies took it kindly
when he "got in" for Mayor, and offered him amused
congratulations. He made a personal claim on their
cordiality, which was not the least of his political
resources. Nature had fitted him to public uses; the
impression overflowed the ranks of his own supporters
and softened asperity among his opponents. Illustration
lies, at this moment close to us. They had not been in
the same room a quarter of an hour before he was in deep
and affectionate converse with Lorne Murchison, whose
party we know, and whose political weight was increasing,
as this influence often does, with a rapidity out of
proportion with his professional and general significance.

"It's a pity now," said Mr Winter, with genial interest,
"you can't get that Ormiston defence into your own hands.
Very useful thing for you."

The younger man shifted a little uncomfortably in his
seat. It is one thing to entertain a private vision and
another to see it materialized on other lips.

"Oh I'd like it well enough," he said, "but it's out of
the question, of course. I'm too small potatoes."

"There's a lot of feeling for old Ormiston. Folks out
there on the Reserve don't know how to show it enough."

"They've shown it a great deal too much. We don't want
to win on 'feeling,' or have it said either. And we were
as near as possible having to take the case to the Hamilton
Assizes."

"I guess you were--I guess you were." Mr Winter's suddenly
increased gravity expressed his appreciation of the
danger. "I saw Lister of the Bank the day they heard from
Toronto--rule refused. Never saw a man more put out.
Seems they considered the thing as good as settled.
General opinion was it would go to Hamilton, sure. Well
I don't know how you pulled it off, but it was a smart
piece of work, sir."

Lorne encountered Mr Winter's frank smile with an expression
of crude and rather stolid discomfort. It had a base of
indignation, corrected by a concession to the common idea
that most events, with an issue pendent, were the result
of a smart piece of work: a kind of awkward shrug was in
it. He had no desire to be unpleasant to Walter Winter--on
the contrary. Nevertheless, an uncompromising line came
on each side of his mouth with his reply.

"As far as I know," he said, "the application was dismissed
on its demerits."

"Of course it was," said Mr Winter good-humouredly. "You
don't need to tell me that. Well, now, this looks like
dancing. Miss Filkin, I see, is going to oblige on the
piano. Now I wonder whether I'm going to get Miss Dora
to give me a waltz or not."

Chairs and table were in effect being pushed back, and
folding doors opened which disclosed another room prepared
for this relaxation. Miss Filkin began to oblige vigorously
on the piano, Miss Dora granted Mr Winter's request,
which he made with elaborate humour as an impudent old
bachelor whom "the boys" would presently take outside
and kill. Lorne watched him make it, envying him his
assurance; and Miss Milburn was aware that he watched
and aware that he envied. The room filled with gaiety
and movement: Mr Milburn, sidling dramatically along the
wall to escape the rotatory couples, admonished Mr
Murchison to get a partner. He withdrew himself from the
observation of Miss Dora and Mr Winter, and approached
a young lady on a sofa, who said "With very great pleasure."
When the dance was over he re-established the young lady
on the sofa and fanned her with energy. Looking across
the room, he saw that Walter Winter, seated beside Dora,
was fanning himself. He thought it disgusting and, for
some reason which he did not pause to explore, exactly
like Winter. He had met Miss Milburn once or twice before
without seeing her in any special way: here, at home,
the centre of the little conventions that at once protected
and revealed her, conventions bound up in the impressive
figures of her mother and her aunt, she had a new interest,
and all the attraction of that which is not easily come
by. It is also possible that although Lorne had met her
before, she had not met him; she was meeting him now for
the first time, as she sat directly opposite and talked
very gracefully to Walter Winter. Addressing Walter
Winter, Lorne was the object of her pretty remarks. While
Mr Winter had her superficial attention, he was the bland
medium which handed her on. Her consciousness was fixed
on young Mr Murchison, quite occupied with him: she could
not imagine why they had not asked him long ago; he wasn't
exactly "swell," but you could see he was somebody. So
already she figured the potential distinction in the set
of his shoulders and the carriage of his head. It might
have been translated in simple terms of integrity and
force by anyone who looked for those things. Miss Milburn
was incapable of such detail, but she saw truly enough
in the mass.

Lorne, on the opposite sofa, looked at her across the
town's traditions of Milburn exclusiveness. Oddly enough,
at this moment when he might have considered that he had
overcome them, they seemed to gather force, exactly in
his line of vision. He had never before been so near Dora
Milburn, and he had never before perceived her so remote.
He had a sense of her distance beyond those few yards of
carpet quite incompatible with the fact. It weighed upon
him, but until she sent him a sudden unexpected smile he
did not know how heavily. It was a dissipating smile;
nothing remained before it. Lorne carefully restored his
partner's fan, bowed before her, and went straight across
the room.




Chapter VII

It is determined with something like humour that communities
very young should occupy themselves almost altogether
with matters of grave and serious import. The vision of
life at that period is no doubt unimpeded and clear; its
conditions offer themselves with a certain nakedness and
force, both as to this world and to that which is to
come. The town of Elgin thus knew two controlling
interests--the interest of politics and the interest of
religion. Both are terms we must nevertheless circumscribe.
Politics wore a complexion strictly local, provincial,
or Dominion. The last step of France in Siam, the disputed
influence of Germany in the Persian Gulf, the struggle
of the Powers in China were not matters greatly talked
over in Elgin; the theatre of European diplomacy had no
absorbed spectators here. Nor can I claim that interest
in the affairs of Great Britain was in any way extravagant.

A sentiment of affection for the reigning house certainly
prevailed. It was arbitrary, rococo, unrelated to current
conditions as a tradition sung down in a ballad, an
anachronism of the heart, cherished through long rude
lifetimes for the beauty and poetry of it--when you
consider, beauty and poetry can be thought of in this.
Here was no Court aiding the transmutation of the middle
class, no King spending money; here were no picturesque
contacts of Royalty and the people, no pageantry, no
blazonry of the past, nothing to lift the heart but an
occasional telegram from the monarch expressing, upon an
event of public importance, a suitable emotion. Yet the
common love for the throne amounted to a half-ashamed
enthusiasm that burned with something like a sacred flame,
and was among the things not ordinarily alluded to,
because of the shyness that attaches to all feeling that
cannot be justified in plain terms. A sentiment of
affection for the reigning house certainly prevailed;
but it was a thing by itself. The fall of a British
Government would hardly fail to excite comment, and the
retirement of a Prime Minister would induce both the
Mercury and the Express to publish a biographical sketch
of him, considerably shorter than the leader embodying
the editor's views as to who should get the electric
light contract. But the Government might become the sole
employer of labour in those islands, Church and school
might part company for ever, landlords might be deprived
of all but compassionate allowances and, except for the
degree of extravagance involved in these propositions,
they would hardly be current in Elgin. The complications
of England's foreign policy were less significant still.
It was recognized dimly that England had a foreign policy,
more or less had to have it, as they would have said in
Elgin; it was part of the huge unnecessary scheme of
things for which she was responsible--unnecessary from
Elgin's point of view as a father's financial obligations
might be to a child he had parted with at birth. It all
lay outside the facts of life, far beyond the actual
horizon, like the affairs of a distant relation from whom
one has nothing to hope, not even personal contact, and
of whose wealth and greatness one does not boast much,
because of the irony involved. Information upon all these
matters was duly put before Elgin every morning in the
telegrams of the Toronto papers; the information came,
until the other day, over cables to New York and was
disseminated by American news agencies. It was, therefore,
not devoid of bias; but if this was perceived it was by
no means thought a matter for protesting measures,
especially as they would be bound to involve expense.
The injury was too vague, too remote, to be more than
sturdily discounted by a mental attitude. Belief in
England was in the blood, it would not yield to the
temporary distortion of facts in the newspapers--at all
events, it would not yield with a rush. Whether there
was any chance of insidious sapping was precisely what
the country was too indifferent to discover. Indifferent,
apathetic, self-centred--until whenever, down the wind,
across the Atlantic, came the faint far music of the call
to arms. Then the old dog of war that has his kennel in
every man rose and shook himself, and presently there
would be a baying! The sense of kinship, lying too deep
for the touch of ordinary circumstance, quickened to
that; and in a moment "we" were fighting, "we" had lost
or won.

Apart, however, from the extraordinary, the politics of
Elgin's daily absorption were those of the town, the
Province, the Dominion. Centres of small circumference
yield a quick swing; the concern of the average intelligent
Englishman as to the consolidation of his country's
interests in the Yangtse Valley would be a languid
manifestation beside that of an Elgin elector in the
chances of an appropriation for a new court house. The
single mind is the most fervid: Elgin had few distractions
from the question of the court house or the branch line
to Clayfield. The arts conspired to be absent; letters
resided at the nearest university city; science was
imported as required, in practical improvements. There
was nothing, indeed, to interfere with Elgin's attention
to the immediate, the vital, the municipal: one might
almost read this concentration of interest in the white
dust of the rambling streets, and the shutters closed
against it. Like other movements of the single mind, it
had something of the ferocious, of the inflexible, of
the unintelligent; but it proudly wore the character of
the go-ahead and, as Walter Winter would have pointed
out to you, it had granted eleven bonuses to "capture"
sound commercial concerns in six years.

In wholesome fear of mistake, one would hesitate to put
church matters either before or after politics among the
preoccupations of Elgin. It would be safer and more
indisputable to say that nothing compared with religion
but politics, and nothing compared with politics but
religion. In offering this proposition also we must think
of our dimensions. There is a religious fervour in Oxford,
in Mecca, in Benares, and the sign for these ideas is
the same; we have to apply ourselves to the interpretation.
In Elgin religious fervour was not beautiful, or dramatic,
or self-immolating; it was reasonable. You were perhaps
your own first creditor; after that your debt was to your
Maker. You discharged this obligation in a spirit of
sturdy equity: if the children didn't go to Sunday school
you knew the reason why. The habit of church attendance
was not only a basis of respectability, but practically
the only one: a person who was "never known to put his
head inside a church door" could not be more severely
reprobated, by Mrs Murchison at all events. It was the
normal thing, the thing which formed the backbone of
life, sustaining to the serious, impressive to the light,
indispensable to the rest, and the thing that was more
than any of these, which you can only know when you stand
in the churches among the congregations. Within its
prescribed limitations it was for many the intellectual
exercise, for more the emotional lift, and for all the
unfailing distraction of the week. The repressed magnetic
excitement in gatherings of familiar faces, fellow-beings
bound by the same convention to the same kind of behaviour,
is precious in communities where the human interest is
still thin and sparse. It is valuable in itself, and it
produces an occasional detached sensation. There was the
case, in Dr Drummond's church, of placid-faced, saintly
old Sandy MacQuhot, the epileptic. It used to be a common
regret with Lorne Murchison that as sure as he was allowed
to stay away from church Sandy would have a fit. That
was his little boy's honesty; the elders enjoyed the fit
and deprecated the disturbance.

There was a simple and definite family feeling within
communions. "They come to our church" was the argument
of first force whether for calling or for charity. It
was impossible to feel toward a Congregationalist or an
Episcopalian as you felt toward one who sang the same
hymns and sat under the same admonition week by week,
year in and year out, as yourself. "Wesleyans, are they?"
a lady of Knox Church would remark of the newly arrived,
in whom her interest was suggested. "Then let the Wesleyans
look after them." A pew-holder had a distinct status; an
"adherent" enjoyed friendly consideration, especially if
he adhered faithfully; and stray attendants from other
congregations were treated with punctilious hospitality,
places being found for them in the Old Testament, as if
they could hardly be expected to discover such things
for themselves. The religious interest had also the
strongest domestic character in quite another sense from
that of the family prayers which Dr Drummond was always
enjoying. "Set your own house in order and then your own
church" was a wordless working precept in Elgin. Threadbare
carpet in the aisles was almost as personal a reproach
as a hole under the dining-room table; and self-respect
was barely possible to a congregation that sat in faded
pews. The minister's gown even was the subject of scrutiny
as the years went on. It was an expensive thing to buy,
but an oyster supper would do it and leave something over
for the organ. Which brings us to the very core and centre
of these activities, their pivot, their focus and, in a
human sense, their inspiration--the minister himself.

The minister was curiously special among a people so
general; he was in a manner raised in life on weekdays
as he was in the pulpit on Sundays. He had what one might
call prestige; some form of authority still survived in
his person, to which the spiritual democracy he presided
over gave a humorous, voluntary assent. He was supposed
to be a person of undetermined leisure--what was writing
two sermons a week to earn your living by?--and he was
probably the more reverend, or the more revered, from
the fact that he was in the house all day. A particular
importance attached to everything he said and did; he
was a person whose life answered different springs, and
was sustained on quite another principle than that of
supply and demand. The province of public criticism was
his; but his people made up for the meekness with which
they sat under it by a generous use of the corresponding
privilege in private. Comments upon the minister partook
of hardiness; it was as if the members were determined
to live up to the fact that the office-bearers could
reduce his salary if they liked. Needless to say, they
never did like. Congregations stood loyally by their
pastors, and discussion was strictly intramural. If the
Methodists handed theirs on at the end of three years
with a breath of relief, they exhaled it among themselves;
after all, for them it was a matter of luck. The
Presbyterians, as in the case of old Mr Jamesion of St
Andrew's, held on till death, pulling a long upper lip:
election was not a thing to be trifled with in heaven or
upon earth.

It will be imagined whether Dr Drummond did not see in
these conditions his natural and wholesome element,
whether he did not fit exactly in. The God he loved to
worship as Jehovah had made him a beneficent despot and
given him, as it were, a commission. If the temporal
power had charged him to rule an eastern province, he
would have brought much the same qualities to the task.
Knox Church, Elgin, was his dominion, its moral and
material affairs his jealous interest, and its legitimate
expansion his chief pride. In "anniversary" sermons,
which he always announced the Sunday before, he seldom
refrained from contrasting the number on the roll of
church membership, then and now, with the particular
increase in the year just closed. If the increase was
satisfactory, he made little comment beyond the duty of
thanksgiving--figures spoke for themselves. If it was
otherwise Dr Drummond's displeasure was not a thing he
would conceal. He would wing it eloquently on the shaft
of his grief that the harvest had been so light; but he
would more than hint the possibility that the labourers
had been few. Most important among his statistics was
the number of young communicants. Wanderers from other
folds he admitted, with a not wholly satisfied eye upon
their early theological training, and to persons duly
accredited from Presbyterian churches elsewhere he gave
the right hand of fellowship; but the young people of
his own congregation were his chief concern always, and
if a gratifying number of these had failed to "come
forward" during the year, the responsibility must lie
somewhere. Dr Drummond was willing to take his own share;
"the ministrations of this pulpit" would be more than
suspected of having come short, and the admission would
enable him to tax the rest upon parents and Bible-class
teachers with searching effect. The congregation would
go gloomily home to dinner, and old Sandy MacQuhot would
remark to his wife, "It's hard to say why will the Doctor
get himself in sic a state aboot mere numbers. We're told
'where two or three are gathered together.' But the
Doctor's all for a grand congregation."

Knox Church, under such auspices could hardly fail to
enlarge her borders; but Elgin enlarged hers faster.
Almost before you knew where you were there spread out
the district of East Elgin, all stacks of tall chimneys
and rows of little houses. East Elgin was not an attractive
locality; it suffered from inundation sometimes, when
the river was in spring flood; it gave unresentful room
to a tannery. It was the home of dubious practices at
the polls, and the invariable hunting-ground for domestic
servants. Nevertheless, in the view of Knox Church, it
could not bear a character wholly degraded; too many
Presbyterians, Scotch foremen, and others, had their
respectable residence there. For these it was a far cry
to Dr Drummond in bad weather, and there began to be talk
of hiring the East Elgin schoolhouse for Sunday exercises
if suitable persons could be got to come over from Knox
Church and lead them. I do not know who was found to
broach the matter to Dr Drummond; report says his relative
and housekeeper, Mrs Forsyth, who perhaps might do it
under circumstances of strategical advantage. Mrs Forsyth,
or whoever it was, had her reply in the hidden terms of
an equation--was it any farther for the people of East
Elgin to walk to hear him preach than for him to walk to
minister to the people of East Elgin, which he did quite
once a week, and if so, how much? Mrs Forsyth, or whoever
it was, might eliminate the unknown quantity. It cannot
be said that Dr Drummond discouraged the project; he
simply did not mention it and as it was known to have
been communicated to him this represented effectively
the policy of the closed door. He found himself even
oftener in East Elgin, walking about on his pastoral
errands with a fierce briskness of aspect and a sharp
inquiring eye, before which one might say the proposition
slunk away. Meanwhile, the Methodists who, it seemed,
could tolerate decentralization, or anything short of
round dances, opened a chapel with a cheerful sociable,
and popularized the practice of backsliding among those
for whom the position was theologically impossible. Good
Presbyterians in East Elgin began to turn into makeshift
Methodists. The Doctor missed certain occupants of the
gallery seats and felt the logic of circumstances. Here
we must all yield, and the minister concealed his
discomfiture in a masterly initiative. The matter came
up again at a meeting of the church managers, brought up
by Dr Drummond, who had the satisfaction of hearing that
a thing put into the Doctor's hands was already half
done. In a very few weeks it was entirely done. The use
of the schoolhouse was granted through Dr Drummond's
influence with the Board free of charge; and to understand
the triumph of this it should be taken into account that
three of the trustees were Wesleyans. Services were held
regularly, certain of Dr Drummond's elders officiating;
and the conventicle in the schoolhouse speedily became
known as Knox Church Mission. It grew and prospered. The
first night "I to the hills will lift mine eyes" went up
from East Elgin on the uplifting tune that belongs to
it, the strayed came flocking back.

This kind never go forth again; once they refind the ark
of the covenant there they abide. In the course of time
it became a question of a better one, and money w