That evening the Murchisons' doorbell rang twice. The first time it was to admit the Rev. Hugh Finlay, who had come to return Sordello, which he had borrowed from Advena, and to find out whether she thought with him about the interpretation of certain passages, and if not—there was always the possibility—wherein their divergence lay. The second time the door opened to Dr Drummond and Mr Cruickshank; and the electric light had to be turned on in the drawing-room, since the library was already occupied by Mr Finlay and Advena, Mr and Mrs Murchison never having got over their early habit of sitting in the dining-room after tea. Even then Mrs Murchison had to put away her workbasket, and John Murchison to knock the ashes out of his pipe, looking at one another with surprised inquiry when Eliza informed them of their visitors. Luckily, Mr Lorne was also in, and Eliza was sent to tell him, and Mr Lorne came down the stairs two at a time to join the party in the drawing-room, which was presently supplied by Eliza with a dignified service of cake and wine. The hall divided that room from the library, and both doors were shut. We cannot hesitate about which to open; we have only, indeed, to follow the recognized tradition of Elgin, which would never have entered the library. No vivid conclusion should be drawn, no serious situation may even be indicated. It would simply have been considered, in Elgin, stupid to go into the library.

"It isn't a case for the High Commissioner for Canada," Mr Cruickshank was saying. "It's a case for direct representation of the interests concerned, and their view of the effect upon trade. That's the only voice to speak with if you want to get anything done. Conviction carries conviction. The High Commissioner is a very useful fellow to live in London and look after the ornamental, the sentimental, and immigration—nobody could do it better than Selkirk. And in England, of course, they like that kind of agency. It's the good old dignified way; but it won't do for everything. You don't find our friend Morgan operating through the American equivalent of a High Commissioner."

"No, you don't," said John Murchison.

"He goes over there as a principal, and the British Government, if he wants to deal with it, is only another principal. That's the way our deputation will go. We're practically all shippers, though of course the matter of tenders will come later. There is big business for them here, national business, and we propose to show it. The subsidy we want will come back to the country four times over in two years. Freights from Boston alone—"

"It's the patriotic, imperial argument you'll have to press, I doubt," said John Murchison. "They're not business people over there—the men in office are not. How should they be? The system draws them from the wrong class. They're gentlemen—noblemen, maybe—first, and they've no practical education. There's only one way of getting it, and that's to make your own living. How many of them have ever made tuppence? There's where the Americans beat them so badly—they've got the sixth sense, the business sense. No; you'll not find them responding greatly to what there is in it for trade—they'd like to well enough, but they just won't see it; and, by George! what a fine suspicion they'll have of ye! As to freights from Boston," he continued, as they all laughed, "I'm of opinion you'd better not mention them. What! steal the trade of a friendly power! Tut, tut!"

It was a long speech for John Murchison, but they were all excited to a pitch beyond the usual. Henry Cruickshank had brought with him an event of extraordinary importance. It seemed to sit there with him, significant and propitious, in the middle of the sofa; they all looked at it in the pauses. Dr Drummond, lost in an armchair, alternately contemplated it and remembered to assert himself part of it. As head of a deputation from the United Chambers of Commerce of Canada shortly to wait on the British Government to press for the encouragement of improved communications within the Empire, Cruickshank had been asked to select a secretary. The appointment, in view of the desirability, for political reasons, of giving the widest publicity to the hopes and motives of the deputation, was an important one. The action of the Canadian Government, in extending conditional promises of support, had to be justified to the Canadian taxpayer; and that shy and weary person whose shoulders uphold the greatness of Britain, had also to receive such conciliation and reassurance as it was possible to administer to him, by way of nerving the administrative arm over there to an act of enterprise. Mr Cruickshank had had two or three young fellows, mostly newspaper men, in his mind's eye; but when Lorne came into his literal range of vision, the others had promptly been retired in our friend's favour. Young Mr Murchison, he had concluded, was the man they wanted; and if his office could spare him, it would probably do young Mr Murchison no harm in any sort of way to accompany the deputation to London and throw himself into the matter the deputation had at heart.

"But it's the Empire!" said Lorne, with a sort of shy fire, when Mr Cruickshank enunciated this.

We need not, perhaps, dwell upon the significance of his agreement. It was then not long since the maple leaf had been stained brighter than ever, not without honour, to maintain the word that fell from him. The three older men looked at him kindly; John Murchison, rubbing his chin as he considered the situation, slightly shook his head. One took it that in his view the Empire was not so readily envisaged.

"That has a strong bearing," Mr Cruickshank assented.

"It's the whole case—it seems to me," repeated young Murchison.

"It should help to knit us up," said Dr Drummond. "I'll put my name down on the first passenger list, if Knox Church will let me off. See that you have special rates," he added, with a twinkle, "for ministers and missionaries."

"And only ten days to get him ready in," said Mrs Murchison. "It will take some seeing to, I assure you; and I don't know how it's to be done in the time. For once, Lorne, I'll have to order you ready-made shirts, and you'll just have to put up with it. Nothing else could possibly get back from the wash."

"I'll put up with it, Mother."

They went into other details of Lorne's equipment while Mrs Murchison's eye still wandered over the necessities of his wardrobe. They arranged the date on which he was to meet the members of the deputation in Montreal, and Mr Cruickshank promised to send him all available documents and such presentation of the project as had been made in the newspapers.

"You shall be put in immediate possession of the bones of the thing," he said, "but what really matters," he added pleasantly, "I think you've got already."

It took, of course, some discussion, and it was quite ten o'clock before everything was gone into, and the prospect was clear to them all. As they emerged into the hall together, the door of the room opposite also opened, and the Rev. Hugh Finlay found himself added to their group. They all made the best of the unexpected encounter. It was rather an elaborate best, very polite and entirely grave, except in the instance of Dr Drummond, who met his subaltern with a smile in which cordiality struggled in vain to overcome the delighted humour.



CHAPTER XII

It was the talk of the town, the pride of the market-place, Lorne Murchison's having been selected to accompany what was known as the Cruickshank deputation to England. The general spirit of congratulation was corrected by a tendency to assert it another proof of sagacity on the chairman's part; Elgin wouldn't be too flattered; Lawyer Cruickshank couldn't have done better. You may be sure the Express was well ahead with it. "Honour to Our Young Fellow Townsman. A Well-Merited Compliment," and Rawlins was round promptly next morning to glean further particulars. He found only Mrs Murchison, on a stepladder tying up the clematis that climbed about the verandah, and she told him a little about clematis and a good deal about the inconvenience of having to abandon superintending the spring cleaning in order to get Lorne ready to go to the Old Country at such short notice, but nothing he could put in the paper. Lorne, sought at the office, was hardly more communicative. Mr Williams himself dropped in there. He said the Express would now have a personal interest in the object of the deputation, and proposed to strike out a broad line, a broader line than ever.

"We've got into the way of taking it for granted," said Mr Williams, "that the subsidy idea is a kind of mediaeval idea. Raise a big enough shout and you get things taken for granted in economics for a long while. Conditions keep changing, right along, all the time, and presently you've got to reconsider. There ain't any sort of ultimate truth in the finest economic position, my son; not any at all."

"We'll subsidize over here, right enough," said Lorne.

"That's the idea—that's the prevailing idea, just now. But lots of people think different—more than you'd imagine. I was talking to old man Milburn just now—he's dead against it. 'Government has no business,' he said, 'to apply the taxes in the interests of any company. It oughtn't to know how to spell "subsidy." If the trade was there it would get itself carried,' he said."

"Well, that surprises me," said Lorne.

"Surprised me, too. But I was on the spot with him; just thought of it in time. 'Well, now, Mr Milburn,' I said, 'you've changed your mind. Thought that was a thing you Conservatives never did,' I said. 'We don't—I haven't,' he said. 'What d'ye mean? Twenty-five years ago,' I said, 'when you were considering whether you'd start the Milburn Boiler Works here or in Hamilton, Hamilton offered you a free site, and Elgin offered you a free site and a dam for your water power. You took the biggest subsidy an' came here,' I said."

Lorne laughed: "What did he say to that?"

"Hadn't a word. 'I guess it's up to me,' he said. Then he turned round and came back. 'Hold on, Williams; he said. 'You know so much already about my boiler works, it wouldn't be much trouble for you to write out an account of them from the beginning, would it? Working in the last quarter of a century of the town's progress, you know, and all that. Come round to the office tomorrow, and I'll give you some pointers.' And he fixed up a two-column ad right away. He was afraid I'd round on him, I suppose, if I caught him saying anything more about the immorality of subsidies."

"He won't say anything more."

"Probably not. Milburn hasn't got much of a political conscience, but he's got a sense of what's silly. Well, now, I expect you want all the time there is."

Mr Williams removed himself from the edge of the table, which was strewn with maps and bluebooks, printed official, and typewritten demi-official papers.

"Give 'em a notion of those Assiniboian wheat acres, my boy, and the ranch country we've got; tell 'em about the future of quick passage and cold storage. Get 'em a little ashamed to have made so many fortunes for Yankee beef combines; persuade 'em the cheapest market has a funny way of getting the dearest price in the end. Give it 'em, Lorne, hot and cold and fricasseed. The Express will back you up."

He slapped his young friend's shoulder, who seemed occupied with matters that prevented his at once feeling the value of this assurance. "Bye-bye," said Mr Williams. "See you again before you start."

"Oh, of course!" Lorne replied. "I'll—I'll come round. By the way, Williams, Mr Milburn didn't say anything—anything about me in connection with this business? Didn't mention, I suppose, what he thought about my going?"

"Not a word, my boy! He was away up in abstract principles; he generally is. Bye-bye."

"It's gone to his head a little bit—only natural," Horace reflected as he went down the stairs. "He's probably just feeding on what folks think of it. As if it mattered a pin's head what Octavius Milburn thinks or don't think!"

Lorne, however, left alone with his customs returns and his immigration reports, sat still, attaching a weight quite out of comparison with a pin's head to Mr Milburn's opinion. He turned it over and over, instead of the tabulated figures that were his business: he had to show himself his way to the conclusion that such a thing could not matter seriously in the end, since Milburn hadn't a dollar involved—it would be different if he were a shareholder in the Maple Line. He wished heartily, nevertheless, that he could demonstrate a special advantage to boiler-makers in competitive freights with New York. What did they import, confound them! Pig-iron? Plates and rivets? Fortunately he was in a position to get at the facts, and he got at them with an interest of even greater intensity than he had shown to the whole question since ten that morning. Even now, the unprejudiced observer, turning up the literature connected with the Cruickshank deputation, may notice a stress laid upon the advantages to Canadian importers of ore in certain stages of manufacture which may strike him as slightly, very slightly, special. Of course there are a good many of them in the country. So that Mr Horace Williams was justified to some extent in his kindly observation upon the excusable egotism of youth. Two or three letters, however, came in while Lorne was considering the relation of plates and rivets to the objects of his deputation. They were all congratulatory; one was from the chairman of the Liberal Association at its headquarters in Toronto. Lorne glanced at them and stowed them away in his pocket. He would read them when he got home, when it would be a pleasure to hand them over to his mother. She was making a collection of them.

He had a happy perception that same evening that Mr Milburn's position was not, after all, finally and invincibly taken against the deputation and everything—everybody—concerned with it. He met that gentleman at his own garden gate. Octavius paused in his exit, to hold it open for young Murchison, thus even assisting the act of entry, a thing which thrilled Lorne sweetly enough when he had time to ponder its possible significance. Alas! the significance that lovers find! Lorne read a world in the behaviour of Dora's father in holding the gate open. He saw political principle put aside in his favour, and social position forgotten in kindness to him. He saw the gravest, sincerest appreciation of his recent success, which he took as humbly as a dog will take a bone; he read a fatherly thought at which his pulses bounded in an arrogance of triumph, and his heart rose to ask its trust. And Octavius Milburn had held the gate open because it was more convenient to hold it open than to leave it open. He had not a political view in the world that was calculated to affect his attitude toward a practical matter; and his opinion of Lorne was quite uncomplicated: he thought him a very likely young fellow. Milburn himself, in the Elgin way, preferred to see no great significance of this sort anywhere. Young people were young people; it was natural enough that they should like each other's society. They, the Milburns, were very glad to see Mr Murchison, very glad indeed. It was frequent matter for veiled humorous reference at the table that he had been to call again, at which Dora would look very stiff and dignified, and have to be coaxed back into the conversation. As to anything serious, there was no hurry; plenty of time to think of that. Such matters dwelt under the horizon; there was no need to scan them closely; and Mr Milburn went his way, conscious of nothing more than a comfortable gratification that Dora, so far as the young men were concerned, seemed as popular as other girls.

Dora was not in the drawing-room. Young ladies in Elgin had always to be summoned from somewhere. For all the Filkin instinct for the conservation of polite tradition, Dora was probably reading the Toronto society weekly—illustrated, with correspondents all over the Province—on the back verandah and, but for the irruption of a visitor, would probably not have entered the formal apartment of the house at all that evening. Drawing-rooms in Elgin had their prescribed uses—to receive in, to practise in, and for the last sad entertainment of the dead, when the furniture was disarranged to accommodate the trestles; but the common business of life went on outside them, even among prosperous people, the survival, perhaps, of a habit based upon thrift. The shutters were opened when Lorne entered, to let in the spring twilight, and the servant pulled a chair into its proper relation with the room as she went out.

Mrs Milburn and Miss Filkin both came in before Dora did. Lorne found their conversation enchanting, though it was mostly about the difficulty of keeping the lawn tidy; they had had so much rain. Mrs Milburn assured him kindly that there was not such another lawn as his father's in Elgin. How Mr Murchison managed to have it looking so nice always she could not think. Only yesterday she and Mr Milburn had stopped to admire it as they passed.

"Spring is always a beautiful time in Elgin," she remarked. "There are so many pretty houses here, each standing in its own grounds. Nothing very grand, as I tell my friend, Miss Cham, from Buffalo where the residences are, of course, on quite a different scale; but grandeur isn't everything, is it?"

"No, indeed," said Lorne.

"But you will be leaving for Great Britain very soon now, Mr Murchison," said Miss Filkin. "Leaving Elgin and all its beauties! And I dare say you won't think of them once again till you get back!"

"I hope I shall not be so busy as that, Miss Filkin."

"Oh, no, I'm sure Mr Murchison won't forget his native town altogether," said Mrs Milburn, "though perhaps he won't like it so well after seeing dear old England!"

"I expect," said Lorne simply, "to like it better."

"Well, of course, we shall all be pleased if you say that, Mr Murchison," Mrs Milburn replied graciously. "We shall feel quite complimented. But I'm afraid you will find a great deal to criticize when you come back—that is, if you go at all into society over there. I always say there can be nothing like good English society."

"I want to attend a sitting of the House," Lorne said. "I hope I shall have time for that. I want to see those fellows handling their public business. I don't believe I shall find our men so far behind, for point of view and grasp and dispatch. Of course there's always Wallingham to make a standard for us all. But they haven't got so many Wallinghams."

"Wasn't it Wallingham, Louisa, that Mr Milburn was saying at breakfast was such a dangerous man? So able, he said, but dangerous. Something to do with the tariff."

"Oh?" said Lorne, and he said no more, for at that moment Dora came in. She came in looking very straight and graceful and composed. Her personal note was carried out in her pretty clothes, which hung and "sat" upon her like the rhythm of verses; they could fall no other way. She had in every movement the definite accent of young ladyhood; she was very much aware of herself, of the situation, and of her value in it, a setting for herself she saw it, and saw it truly. No one, from the moment she entered the room, looked at anything else.

"Oh, Mr Murchison," she said. "How do you do? Mother, do you mind if I open the window? It's quite warm out of doors—regular summer."

Lorne sprang to open the window, while Miss Filkin, murmuring that it had been a beautiful day, moved a little farther from it.

"Oh, please don't trouble, Mr Murchison; thank you very much!" Miss Milburn continued, and subsided on a sofa. "Have you been playing tennis this week?"

Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only once.

"The courts aren't a bit in good order. They want about a week's rolling. The balls get up anywhere," said Dora.

"Lawn tennis," Mrs Milburn asserted herself, "is a delightful exercise. I hope it will never go out of fashion; but that is what we used to say of croquet, and it has gone out and come in again."

Lorne listened to this with deference; there was a hint of patience in the regard Dora turned upon her mother. Mrs Milburn continued to dilate upon lawn tennis, dealt lightly with badminton, and brought the conversation round with a graceful sweep to canoeing. Dora's attitude before she had done became slightly permissive, but Mrs Milburn held on till she had accomplished her conception of conduct for the occasion; then she remembered a meeting in the schoolhouse.

"We are to have an address by an Indian bishop," she told them. "He is on his way to England by China and Japan, and is staying with our dear rector, Mr Murchison. Such a treat I expect it will be."

"What I am dying to know," said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, "is whether he is black or white!"

Mrs Milburn then left the room, and shortly afterward Miss Filkin thought she could not miss the bishop either, conveying the feeling that a bishop was a bishop, of whatever colour. She stayed three minutes longer than Mrs Milburn, but she went. The Filkin tradition, though strong, could not hold out entirely against the unwritten laws, the silently claimed privileges, of youth in Elgin. It made its pretence and vanished.

Even as the door closed the two that were left looked at one another with a new significance. A simpler relation established itself between them and controlled all that surrounded them; the very twilight seemed conscious with it; the chairs and tables stood in attentive harmony.

"You know," said Dora, "I hate your going, Lorne!"

She did indeed seem moved, about the mouth, to discontent. There was some little injury in the way she swung her foot.

"I was hoping Mr Fulke wouldn't get better in time; I was truly!"

The gratitude in young Murchison's eyes should have been dear to her. I don't know whether she saw it; but she must have been aware that she was saying what touched him, making her point.

"Oh, it's a good thing to go, Dora."

"A good thing for you! And the regatta coming off the first week in June, and a whole crowd coming from Toronto for it. There isn't another person in town I care to canoe with, Lorne, you know perfectly well!"

"I'm awfully sorry!" said Lorne. "I wish—"

"Oh, I'm GOING, I believe. Stephen Stuart has written from Toronto, and asked me to sail with him. I haven't told Mother, but he's my second cousin, so I suppose she won't make a fuss."

The young man's face clouded; seeing which she relented. "Oh, of course, I'm glad you're going, really," she assured him. "And we'll all be proud to be acquainted with such a distinguished gentleman when you get back. Do you think you'll see the King? You might, you know, in London."

"I'll see him if he's visible," laughed Lorne. "That would be something to tell your mother, wouldn't it? But I'm afraid we won't be doing business with His Majesty."

"I expect you'll have the loveliest time you ever had in all your life. Do you think you'll be asked out much, Lorne?"

"I can't imagine who would ask me. We'll get off easy if the street boys don't shout: 'What price Canucks?' at us! But I'll see England, Dora; I'll feel England, eat and drink and sleep and live in England, for a little while. Isn't the very name great? I'll be a better man for going, till I die. We're all right out here, but we're young and thin and weedy. They didn't grow so fast in England, to begin with, and now they're rich with character and strong with conduct and hoary with ideals. I've been reading up the history of our political relations with England. It's astonishing what we've stuck to her through, but you can't help seeing why—it's for the moral advantage. Way down at the bottom, that's what it is. We have the sense to want all we can get of that sort of thing. They've developed the finest human product there is, the cleanest, the most disinterested, and we want to keep up the relationship—it's important. Their talk about the value of their protection doesn't take in the situation as it is now. Who would touch us if we were running our own show?"

"I don't believe they are a bit better than we are," replied Miss Milburn. "I'm sure I haven't much opinion of the Englishmen that come out here. They don't think anything of getting into debt, and as often as not they drink, and they never know enough to—to come in out of the rain. But, Lorne—"

"Yes, but we're very apt to get the failures. The fellows their folks give five or six hundred pounds to and tell them they're not expected back till they're making a living. The best men find their level somewhere else, along recognized channels. Lord knows we don't want them—this country's for immigrants. We're manufacturing our own gentlemen quite fast enough for the demand."

"I should think we were! Why, Lorne, Canadians—nice Canadians are just as gentlemanly as they can be! They'll compare with anybody. Perhaps Americans have got more style:" she weighed the matter; "but Canadians are much better form, I think. But, Lorne, how perfectly dear of you to send me those roses. I wore them, and nobody there had such beauties. All the girls wanted to know where I got them, but I only told Lily, just to make her feel a pig for not having asked you—my very greatest friend! She just about apologized—told me she wanted to ask about twenty more people, but her mother wouldn't let her. They've lost an uncle or something lately, and if it hadn't been for Clara Sims staying with them they wouldn't have been giving anything."

"I'll try to survive not having been asked. But I'm glad you wore the roses, Dora."

"I dropped one, and Phil Carter wanted to keep it. He's so silly!"

"Did you—did you let him keep it?"

"Lorne Murchison! Do you think I'd let any man keep a rose I'd been wearing?"

He looked at her, suddenly emboldened. "I don't know about roses, Dora, but pansies—those are awfully nice ones in your dress. I'm very fond of pansies; couldn't you spare me one? I wouldn't ask for a rose, but a pansy—"

His eyes were more ardent than what he found to say. Beneath them Dora grew delicately pink. The pansies drooped a little; she put her slender fingers under one, and lifted its petals.

"It's too faded for your buttonhole," she said.

"It needn't stay in my buttonhole. I know lots of other places!" he begged.

Dora considered the pansy again, then she pulled it slowly out, and the young man got up and went over to her, proffering the lapel of his coat.

"It spoils the bunch," she said prettily. "If I give you this you will have to give me something to take its place."

"I will," said Lorne.

"I know it will be something better," said Dora, and there was a little effort in her composure. "You send people such beautiful flowers, Lorne."

She rose beside him as she spoke, graceful and fair, to fasten it in; and it was his hand that shook.

"Then may I choose it?" said Lorne. "And will you wear it?"

"I suppose you may. Why are you—why do you—Oh, Lorne, stand still!"

"I'll give you, you sweet girl, my whole heart!" he said in the vague tender knowledge that he offered her a garden, where she had but to walk, and smile, to bring about her unimaginable blooms.



CHAPTER XIII

They sat talking on the verandah in the close of the May evening, Mr and Mrs Murchison. The Plummer Place was the Murchison Place in the town's mouth now, and that was only fair; the Murchisons had overstamped the Plummers. It lay about them like a map of their lives: the big horse chestnut stood again in flower to lighten the spring dusk for them, as it had done faithfully for thirty years. John was no longer in his shirt-sleeves; the growing authority of his family had long prescribed a black alpaca coat. He smoked his meerschaum with the same old deliberation, however, holding it by the bowl as considerately as he held its original, which lasted him fifteen years. A great deal of John Murchison's character was there, in the way he held his pipe, his gentleness and patience, even the justice and repose and quiet strength of his nature. He smoked and read the paper the unfailing double solace of his evenings. I should have said that it was Mrs Murchison who talked. She had the advantage of a free mind, only subconsciously occupied with her white wool and agile needles; and John had frequently to choose between her observations and the politics of the day.

"You saw Lorne's letter this morning, Father?"

John took his pipe out of his mouth. "Yes," he said.

"He seems tremendously taken up with Wallingham. It was all Wallingham, from one end to the other."

"It's not remarkable," said John Murchison, patiently.

"You'd think he had nothing else to write about. There was that reception at Lord What-you-may-call-him's, the Canadian Commissioner's, when the Prince and Princess of Wales came, and brought their family. I'd like to have heard something more about that than just that he was there. He might have noticed what the children had on. Now that Abby's family is coming about her I seem to have my hands as full of children's clothes as ever I had. Abby seems to think there's nothing like my old patterns; I'm sure I'm sick of the sight of them!"

Mr Murchison refolded his newspaper, took his pipe once more from his mouth, and said nothing.

"John, put down that paper! I declare it's enough to drive anybody crazy! Now look at that boy walking across the lawn. He does it every night, delivering the Express, and you take no more notice! He's wearing a regular path!"

"Sonny," said Mr Murchison, as the urchin approached, "you mustn't walk across the grass."

"Much good that will do!" remarked Mrs Murchison. "I'd teach him to walk across the grass, if—if it were my business. Boy—isn't your name Willie Parker? Then it was your mother I promised the coat and the other things to, and you'll find them ready there, just inside the hall door. They'll make down very well for you, but you can tell her from me that she'd better double-seam them, for the stuff's apt to ravel. And attend to what Mr Murchison says; go out by the gravel—what do you suppose it's there for?"

Mrs Murchison readjusted her glasses, and turned another row of the tiny sock. "I must say it's a pleasure to have the lawn neat and green," she said, with a sigh. "Never did I expect to see the day it would be anything but chickweed and dandelions. We've a great deal to be thankful for, and all our children spared to us, too. John," she continued, casting a shrewd glance over her needles at nothing in particular; "do you suppose anything was settled between Lorne and Dora Milburn before he Started?"

"He said nothing to me about it."

"Oh, well, very likely he wouldn't. Young people keep such a tremendous lot to themselves nowadays. But it's my belief they've come to an understanding."

"Lily might do worse," said John Murchison, judicially.

"I should think Dora might do worse! I don't know where she's going to do better! The most promising young man in Elgin, well brought up, well educated, well started in a profession! There's not a young fellow in this town to compare with Lorne, and perfectly well you know it, John. Might do worse! But that's you all over. Belittle your own belongings!"

Mr Murchison smiled in amused tolerance. "They've always got you to blow their trumpet, Mother," he replied.

"And more than me. You ought to hear Dr Drummond about Lorne! He says that if the English Government starts that line of boats to Halifax the country will owe it to him, much more than to Cruickshank, or anybody else."

"Dr Drummond likes to talk," said John Murchison.

"Lorne's keeping his end up all right," remarked Stella, jumping off her bicycle in time to hear what her mother said. "It's great, that old Wallingham asking him to dinner. And haven't I just been spreading it!"

"Where have you been, Stella?" asked Mrs Murchison.

"Oh, only over to the Milburns'. Dora asked me to come and show her the new flower-stitch for table centres. Dora's suddenly taken to fancy work. She's started a lot—a lot too much!" Stella added gloomily.

"If Dora likes to do fancy work I don't see why anybody should want to stop her," remarked Mrs Murchison, with a meaning glance at her husband.

"I suppose she thinks she's going to get Lorne," said Stella. Her resentment was only half-serious, but the note was there.

"What put that into your head?" asked her mother.

"Oh, well, anybody can see that he's devoted to her, and has been for ages, and it isn't as if Lorne was one to HAVE girlfriends; she's absolutely the only thing he's ever looked at twice. She hasn't got a ring, that's true, but it would be just like her to want him to get it in England. And I know they correspond. She doesn't make any secret of it."

"Oh, I dare say! Other people have eyes in their head as well as you, Stella," said Mrs Murchison, stooping for her ball. "But there's no need to take things for granted at such a rate. And, above all, you're not to go TALKING, remember!"

"Well, if you think Dora Milburn's good enough," returned Lorne's youngest sister in threatening accents, "it's more than I do, that's all. Hello, Miss Murchison!" she continued, as Advena appeared. "You're looking 'xtremely dinky-dink. Expecting his reverence?"

Advena made no further reply than a look of scornful amusement, which Stella, bicycling forth again, received in the back of her head.

"Father," said Mrs Murchison, "if you had taken any share in the bringing up of this family, Stella ought to have her ears boxed this minute!"

"We'll have to box them," said Mr Murchison, "when she comes back." Advena had retreated into the house. "IS she expecting his reverence?" asked her father with a twinkle.

"Don't ask me! I'm sure it's more than I can tell you. It's a mystery to me, that matter, altogether. I've known him come three evenings in a week and not again for a month of Sundays. And when he does come there they sit, talking about their books and their authors; you'd think the world had nothing else in it! I know, for I've heard them, hard at it, there in the library. Books and authors won't keep their house or look after their family for them; I can tell them that, if it does come to anything, which I hope it won't."

"Finlay's fine in the pulpit," said John Murchison cautiously.

"Oh, the man's well enough; it's him I'm sorry for. I don't call Advena fitted to be a wife, and last of all a minister's. Abby was a treasure for any man to get, and Stella won't turn out at all badly; she's taking hold very well for her age. But Advena simply hasn't got it in her, and that's all there is to say about it." Mrs Murchison pulled her needles out right side out with finality. "I don't deny the girl's talented in her own way, but it's no way to marry on. She'd much better make up her mind just to be a happy independent old maid; any woman might do worse. And take no responsibilities."

"There would always be you, Mother, for them to fall back on." It was as near as John Murchison ever got to flattery.

"No thank you, then! I've brought up six of my own, as well as I was able, which isn't saying much, and a hard life I've had of it. Now I'm done with it; they'll have to find somebody else to fall back on. If they get themselves into such a mess"—Mrs Murchison stopped to laugh with sincere enjoyment—"they needn't look to me to get them out."

"I guess you'd have a hand, Mother."

"Not I. But the man isn't thinking of any such folly. What do you suppose his salary is?"

"Eight hundred and fifty dollars a year. They raised it last month."

"And how far would Advena be able to make that go, with servants getting the money they do and expecting the washing put out as a matter of course? Do you remember Eliza, John, that we had when we were first married? Seven dollars a month she got; she would split wood at a pinch, and I've never had one since that could do up shirts like her. Three years and a half she was with me, and did everything, everything I didn't do. But that was management, and Advena's no manager. It would be me that would tell him, if I had the chance. Then he couldn't say he hadn't been warned. But I don't think he has any such idea."

"Advena," pronounced Mr Murchison, "might do worse."

"Well, I don't know whether she might. The creature is well enough to preach before a congregation. But what she can see in him out of the pulpit is more than I know. A great gawk of a fellow, with eyes that always look as if he were in the middle of next week! He may be able to talk to Advena, but he's no hand at general conversation; I know he finds precious little to say to me. But he's got no such notion. He comes here because, being human, he's got to open his mouth some time or other, I suppose; but it's my opinion he has neither Advena nor anybody else in his mind's eye at present. He doesn't go the right way about it."

"H'm!" said John Murchison.

"He brought her a book the last time he came—what do you think the name of it was? The something or other of Plato! Do you call that a natural gift from a young man who is thinking seriously of a girl? Besides, if I know anything about Plato he was a Greek heathen, and no writer for a Presbyterian minister to go lending around. I'd Plato him to the rightabout if it was me!"

"She might read worse than Plato," remarked John.

"Oh, well, she read it fast enough. She's your own daughter for outlandish books. Mercy on us, here comes the man! We'll just say 'How d'ye do?' to him, and then start for Abby's, John. I'm not easy in my mind about the baby, and I haven't been over since the morning. Harry says it's nothing but stomach, but I think I know whooping-cough when I hear it. And if it is whooping-cough the boy will have to come here and rampage, I suppose, till they're clear of it. There's some use in grandmothers, if I do say it myself!"



CHAPTER XIV

If anyone had told Mr Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first notable interest of his life in the calling and the country to which even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far enough back in accounting for this one would arrive at the female sort, sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend—the mature respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire village whence he came. With such as these relations, actual or imagined, could only be of the most practical kind, matters to be arranged on grounds of expediency, and certainly not of the first importance. The things of first importance—what you could do with your energy and your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it of value to yourself—left little room for the feminine consideration in Finlay's eyes; it was not a thing, simply, that existed there with any significance. Woman in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter of the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic, or perhaps a merely decorative function; in any case, a creature that required an initiation to perceive her—a process to which Finlay would have been as unwilling as he was unlikely to submit. Not that he was destitute of ideals about women—they would have formed in that case a strange exception to his general outlook—but he saw them on a plane detached and impersonal, concerned with the preservation of society the maintenance of the home, the noble devotions of motherhood. Women had been known, historically, to be capable of lofty sentiments and fine actions: he would have been the last to withhold their due from women. But they were removed from the scope of his imagination, partly by the accidents I have mentioned and partly, no doubt, by a simple lack in him of the inclination to seek and to know them.

So that Christie Cameron, when she came to stay with his aunt in Bross during the few weeks after his ordination and before his departure for Canada, found a fair light for judgement and more than a reasonable disposition to acquiesce in the scale of her merits, as a woman, on the part of Hugh Finlay. He was familiar with the scale of her merits before she came; his Aunt Lizzie did little but run them up and down. When she arrived she answered to every item she was a good height, but not too tall; a nice figure of a woman, but not what you would call stout; a fresh-faced body whose excellent principles were written in every feature she had. She was five years older than Hugh, but even that he came to accept in Aunt Lizzie's skilful exhibition as something to the total of her advantages. A pleasant independent creature with a hundred a year of her own, sensible and vigorous and good-tempered, belonging as well to the pre-eminently right denomination. She had virtues that might have figured handsomely in an advertisement had Aunt Lizzie, in the plenitude of her good will, thought fit to take that measure on Christie's behalf. But nothing was farther from Aunt Lizzie's mind. We must, in fairness, add Christie Cameron to the sum of Finlay's acquaintance with the sex; but even then the total is slender, little to go upon.

Yet the fact which Mr Finlay would in those days have considered so unimaginable remained; it had come into being and it remained. The chief interest of his life, the chief human interest, did lie in his relations with Advena Murchison. He might challenge it, but he could not move it; he might explain, but he could not alter it. And there had come no point at which it would have occurred to him to do either. When at last he had seen how simple and possible it was to enjoy Miss Murchison's companionship upon unoccupied evenings he had begun to do it with eagerness and zest, the greater because Elgin offered him practically no other. Dr Drummond lived, for purposes of intellectual contact, at the other end of the century, the other clergy and professional men of the town were separated from Finlay by all the mental predispositions that rose from the virgin soil. He was, as Mrs Murchison said, a great gawk of a fellow; he had little adaptability; he was not of those who spend a year or two in the New World and go back with a trans-Atlantic accent, either of tongue or of mind. Where he saw a lack of dignity, of consideration, or of restraint, he did not insensibly become less dignified or considerate or restrained to smooth out perceptible differences; nor was he constituted to absorb the qualities of those defects, and enrich his nature by the geniality, the shrewdness, the quick mental movement that stood on the other side of the account. He cherished in secret an admiration for the young men of Elgin, with their unappeasable energy and their indomitable optimism, but he could not translate it in any language of sympathy and but for Advena his soul would have gone uncomforted and alone.

Advena, as we know, was his companion. Seeing herself just that, constantly content to be just that, she walked beside him closer than he knew. She had her woman's prescience and trusted it. Her own heart, all sweetly alive, counselled her to patience; her instincts laid her in bonds to concealment. She knew, she was sure; so sure that she could play sometimes, smiling, with her living heart—

The nightingale was not yet heard For the rose was not yet blown,

she could say of his; and what was that but play, and tender laughter, at the expense of her own? And then, perhaps, looking up from the same book, she would whisper, alone in her room—

Oh, speed the day, thou dear, dear May,

and gaze humbly through tears at her own face in the glass loving it on his behalf. She took her passion with the weight of a thing ordained; she had come upon it where it waited for her, and they had gone on together, carrying the secret. There might be farther to go, but the way could never be long.

Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary; and Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was accomplished quickly, even summer.

"Except perhaps civilization." she added. They were both young enough to be pleased with cleverness for its specious self.

"Oh, that is slow everywhere," he observed; "but how you can say so, with every modern improvement staring you in the face—"

"Electric cars and telephones! Oh, I didn't say we hadn't the products," and she laughed. "But the thing itself, the precious thing; that never comes just by wishing, does it? The art of indifference, the art of choice—"

"If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?" he demanded. "Anaemia."

"Oh, I don't quarrel with the logic of it. I only point out the fact. To do that is to acquiesce, really. I acquiesce; I have to. But one may long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life has gone on longer."

"I imagine," Finlay said, "that to wish truly and ardently for such things is to possess them. If you didn't possess them you wouldn't desire them! As they say, as they say—"

"As they say?"

"About love. Some novelist does. To be conscious in any way toward it is to be fatally infected."

"What novelist?" Advena asked, with shining interest.

"Some novelist. I—I can't have invented it," he replied, somewhat confounded. He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon the verandah. "I don't write novels," he said.

"Perhaps you live them," suggested Advena. "I mean, of course," she added, laughing, "the highest class of fiction."

"Heaven forbid!"

"Why Heaven forbid? You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it comes into your scope. You can't see a thing truly without feeling it; you can't feel it without living it. I don't write novels either, but I experience—whole publishers' lists."

"That means," he said, smiling, "that your vision is up to date. You see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day. The modern moral sophistications—?"

"Don't make me out boastful," she replied. "I often do."

"Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid. Old stories of pain"—he looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her adoration—"and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the human heart. At least one likes to hope so."

"I somehow think," she ventured timidly, "that yours would be classic."

Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.

"Oh, I don't know," he said, almost irritably. "I only meant that I see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle. There's reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think that you don't half realize, in a country like this, how much there is to make up."

"Is there anything really to make up?" she asked.

"Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as education! Here you can't even conceive it—the schools have been on logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion; here it doesn't even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. 'By all mean let the ministers serve education on the School Boards,' they would say, 'by election like other people'—an opportunity, by the way, which has just been offered to me. I'm nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett, the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too; there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls' playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring."

"You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes there is something in a fresh start: we're on the straight road as a nation, in most respects; we haven't any picturesque old prescribed lanes to travel. So you think that makes up?"

"It's one thing. You might put down space—elbow-room."

"An empty horizon," Advena murmured.

"For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England has filled hers up. She has now—these," and he nodded at a window open to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.

"Oh, if you have a creative imagination," she said "like Wallingham's. But even then your vision must be only political economic, material. You can't conceive the—flowers—that will come out of all that. And if you could it wouldn't be like having them."

"And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid, buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the plenty of things!"

"I am to be consoled because apples are cheap."

"You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn't it console you to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?"

"No," said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said—

"And those things aren't all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the human spirit, as it is set free in these wide unblemished spaces, may be something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is good and beautiful—"

He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful blush.

"I am glad you are so well satisfied," she said, and then, as if her words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.

Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.



CHAPTER XV

If it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted to draw the history of Lorne Murchison's sojourn in England from his letters home. He put his whole heart into these, his discoveries and his recognitions and his young enthusiasm, all his claimed inheritance, all that he found to criticize and to love. His mother said, half-jealously when she read them, that he seemed tremendously taken up with the old country; and of course she expressed the thing exactly, as she always did: he was tremendously taken up with it. The old country fell into the lines of his imagination, from the towers of Westminster to the shops in the Strand; from the Right Hon. Fawcett Wallingham, who laid great issues before the public, to the man who sang melancholy hymns to the same public up and down the benevolent streets. It was naturally London that filled his view; his business was in London and his time was short; the country he saw from the train, whence it made a low cloudy frame for London, with decorations of hedges and sheep. How he saw London, how he carried away all he did in the time and under the circumstances, may be thought a mystery; there are doubtless people who would consider his opportunities too limited to gather anything essential. Cruickshank was the only one of the deputation who had been "over" before; and they all followed him unquestioningly to the temperance hotel of his preference in Bloomsbury, where bedrooms were three and six and tea was understood as a solid meal and the last in the day. Bates would have voted for the Metropole, and McGill had been advised that you saw a good deal of life at the Cecil, but they bowed to Cruickshank's experience. None of them were total abstainers, but neither had any of them the wine habit; they were not inconvenienced, therefore, in taking advantage of the cheapness with which total abstinence made itself attractive, and they took it, though they were substantial men. As one of them put it, they weren't over there to make a splash, a thing that was pretty hard to do in London, anyhow; and home comforts came before anything. The conviction about the splash was perhaps a little the teaching of circumstances. They were influential fellows at home, who had lived for years in the atmosphere of appreciation that surrounds success; their movements were observed in the newspapers; their names stood for wide interests, big concerns. They had known the satisfaction of a positive importance, not only in their community but in their country; and they had come to England invested as well with the weight that is attached to a public mission. It may very well be that they looked for some echo of what they were accustomed to, and were a little dashed not to find it—to find the merest published announcement of their arrival, and their introduction by Lord Selkirk to the Colonial Secretary; and no heads turned in the temperance hotel when they came into the dining-room. It may very well be. It is even more certain, however that they took the lesson as they found it, with the quick eye for things as they are which seems to come of looking at things as they will be, and with just that humorous comment about the splash. It would be misleading to say that they were humbled; I doubt whether they even felt their relativity, whether they ever dropped consciously, there in the Bloomsbury hotel, into their places in the great scale of London. Observing the scale, recognizing it, they held themselves unaffected by it; they kept, in a curious, positive way, the integrity of what they were and what they had come for; they maintained their point of view. So much must be conceded. The Empire produces a family resemblance, but here and there, when oceans intervene, a different mould of the spirit.

Wallingham certainly invited them to dinner one Sunday, in a body, an occasion which gave one or two of them some anxiety until they found that it was not to be adorned by the ladies of the family. Tricorne was there, President of the Board of Trade, and Fleming, who held the purse-strings of the United Kingdom, two Ministers whom Wallingham had asked because they were supposed to have open minds—open, that is to say, for purposes of assimilation. Wallingham considered, and rightly, that he had done very well for the deputation in getting these two. There were other "colleagues" whose attendance he would have liked to compel; but one of them, deep in the country, was devoting his weekends to his new French motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon Neglected Periods of Mahommedan History, and both were at the breaking strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the deputation to dinner. Lord Selkirk, who took them to Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them to one of those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he was so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard about, upon which royalty was present in two generations. They travelled to it by special train, a circumstance which made them grave, receptive, and even slightly ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty on his hands, naturally could not give them much of his time, and they moved about in a cluster, avoiding the ladies' trains and advising one another that it was a good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large private means; it wasn't everybody that could afford to take the job. Yet they were not wholly detached from the occasion; they looked at it, after they had taken it in, with an air half-amused, half-proprietary. All this had, in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs. One of them—Bates it was—responding to a lady who was effusive about the strawberries, even took the modestly depreciatory attitude of the host. "They're a fair size for this country, ma'am, but if you want berries with a flavour we'll do better for you in the Niagara district."

It must be added that Cruickshank lunched with Wallingham at his club, and with Tricorne at his; and on both occasions the quiet and attentive young secretary went with him, for purposes of reference, his pocket bulging with memoranda. The young secretary felt a little embarrassed to justify his presence at Tricorne's lunch, as the Right Honourable gentleman seemed to have forgotten what his guests had come for beyond it, and talked exclusively and exhaustively about the new possibilities for fruit-farming in England. Cruickshank fairly shook himself into his overcoat with irritation afterward. "It's the sort of thing we must except," he said, as they merged upon Pall Mall. It was not the sort of thing Lorne expected; but we know him unsophisticated and a stranger to the heart of the Empire, which beats through such impediment of accumulated tissue. Nor was it the sort of thing they got from Wallingham, the keen-eyed and probing, whose skill in adjusting conflicting interests could astonish even their expectation, and whose vision of the essentials of the future could lift even their enthusiasm. One would like to linger over their touch with Wallingham, that fusion of energy with energy, that straight, satisfying, accomplishing dart. There is more drama here; no doubt, than in all the pages that are to come. But I am explaining now how little, not how much, the Cruickshank deputation, and especially Lorne Murchison, had the opportunity of feeling and learning in London, in order to show how wonderful it was that Lorne felt and learned so widely. That, what he absorbed and took back with him is, after all, what we have to do with; his actual adventures are of no great importance.

The deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire had few points of contact with the great world, but its members were drawn into engagements of their own, more, indeed, than some of them could conveniently overtake. Mr Bates never saw his niece in the post-office, and regrets it to this day. The engagements arose partly out of business relations. Poulton who was a dyspeptic, complained that nothing could be got through in London without eating and drinking; for his part he would concede a point any time not to eat and drink, but you could not do it; you just had to suffer. Poulton was a principal in one of the railway companies that were competing to open up the country south of Hudson's Bay to the Pacific, but having dealt with that circumstance in the course of the day he desired only to be allowed to go to bed on bread and butter and a little stewed fruit. Bates, whose name was a nightmare to every other dry-goods man in Toronto, naturally had to see a good many of the wholesale people; he, too, complained of the number of courses and the variety of the wines, but only to disguise his gratification. McGill, of the Great Bear Line, had big proposals to make in connection with southern railway freights from Liverpool; and Cameron, for private reasons of magnitude, proposed to ascertain the real probability of a duty to foreigners on certain forms of manufactured leather—he turned out in Toronto a very good class of suitcase. Cruickshank had private connections to which they were all respectful. Nobody but Cruickshank found it expedient to look up the lost leader of the Canadian House of Commons, contributed to a cause still more completely lost in home politics; nobody but Cruickshank was likely to be asked to dine by a former Governor-General of the Dominion, an invitation which nobody but Cruickshank would be likely to refuse.

"It used to be a 'command' in Ottawa," said Cruickshank, who had got on badly with his sovereign's representative there, "but here it's only a privilege. There's no business in it, and I haven't time for pleasure."

The nobleman in question had, in effect, dropped back into the Lords. So far as the Empire was concerned, he was in the impressive rearguard, and this was a little company of fighting men.

The entertainments arising out of business were usually on a scale more or less sumptuous. They took place in big, well-known restaurants, and included a look at many of the people who seem to lend themselves so willingly to the great buzzing show that anybody can pay for in London, their names in the paper in the morning, their faces at Prince's in the evening, their personalities no doubt advantageously exposed in various places during the day. But there were others, humbler ones in Earl's Court Road or Maida Vale, where the members of the deputation had relatives whom it was natural to hunt up. Long years and many billows had rolled between, and more effective separations had arisen in the whole difference of life; still, it was natural to hunt them up, to seek in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps—such is our vanity in the new lands—to show them what the stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn't see much over home.

"England," said Poulton, the Canadian-born, "is a dangerous country to live in; you run such risks of growing old." They agreed, I fear, for more reasons than this that England was a good country to leave early; and you cannot blame them—there was not one of them who did not offer in his actual person proof of what he said. Their own dividing chance grew dramatic in their eyes.

"I was offered a clerkship with the Cunards the day before I sailed," said McGill. "Great Scott, if I'd taken that clerkship!" He saw all his glorious past, I suppose, in a suburban aspect.

"I was kicked out," said Cameron, "and it was the kindest attention my father ever paid me;" and Bates remarked that it was worth coming out second-class, as he did, to go back in the best cabin in the ship.

The appearance and opinions of those they had left behind them prompted them to this kind of congratulation, with just a thought of compunction at the back of it for their own better fortunes. In the further spectacle of England most of them saw the repository of singularly old-fashioned ideas the storehouse of a good deal of money; and the market for unlimited produce. They looked cautiously at imperial sentiment; they were full of the terms of their bargain and had, as they would have said, little use for schemes that did not commend themselves on a basis of common profit. Cruickshank was the biggest and the best of them; but even Cruickshank submitted the common formulas; submitted them and submitted to them.

Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further; only he was alive to the inrush of the essential; he only lifted up his heart.



CHAPTER XVI

Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members of the deputation, as their business progressed, began to feel less like atoms and more like a body exerting an influence, however obscurely hid in a temperance hotel, upon the tide of international affairs; but their secretary had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance that was taken account of. In these respects, no less than in the others, he justified Mr Cruickshank's selection. He did his work as unobtrusively as he did it admirably well; and for the rest he was just washed about, carried, hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses, receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or twice to talk to the bus drivers—he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn't an American. "Yes," he would say in the end, "but not the United States kind," resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside him that there were other kinds. The imperial idea goes so quickly from the heart to the head. He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his denial to the bus drivers.

"I expect it's the next best thing." he would say, "but it's only the next best."

It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.

One introduction of his own he had. Mrs Milburn had got it for him from the rector, Mr Emmett, to his wife's brother, Mr Charles Chafe, who had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens. Lorne put off presenting the letter—did not know, indeed, quite how to present it, till his stay in London was half over. Finally he presented himself with it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr Chafe's works at Chiswick. He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he met Mrs Chafe and the family, when he also met Mr Alfred Hesketh. Lorne went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh—a nephew—was there on the very first occasion. It was an encounter interesting on both sides. He—Hesketh—was a young man with a good public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the capacity of his energy. He had a little money of his own, and no present occupation; he belonged to the surplus. He was not content to belong to it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do. There was always the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite one of the best fellows; he knew that. He had not money enough for politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally into journalism. Anything involving further examinations he rejected on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick. Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long enough.

Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh's age in Hesketh's condition before. Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement; poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence, equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle. He himself had intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen. There never had been any impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire. He was still under his father's roof, but that was for the general happiness; any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry fate, he might have selected another. He was younger than Hesketh by a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still fidgeting at the starting-point.

"Why don't you farm?" he asked once.

"Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before. I can't wait for it. Besides, why should I farm? Why didn't you?"

"Well," said Lorne, "in your case it seems about the only thing left. I? Oh it doesn't attract us over there. We're getting away from it—leaving it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?"

Hesketh's situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere short of the flag. The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it travelled. In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth. They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself. Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much. There was division in the Cabinet, sore travail among private members. The conception being ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion, fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination. Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the insular fog; they shed a brilliance and infectious enthusiasm, but there were not enough to do more than make the fog visible. Many persons found such torches irritating. They pointed out that as England had groped to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further. "Free trade," they said, "has made us what we are. Put out these lights!"

Mr Chafe was one of these. He was a cautious, heavy fellow, full of Burgundy and distrust. The basis of the imperial idea inspired him with suspicion and hostility. He could accept the American tariff on English manufactures; that was a plain position, simple damage, a blow full in the face, not to be dodged. But the offer of better business in the English colonies in exchange for a duty on the corn and meat of foreign countries—he could see too deep for that. The colonials might or might not be good customers; he knew how many decanters he sold in the United States, in spite of the tariff. He saw that the tax on food-stuffs was being commended to the working-man with the argument of higher wages. Higher wages, with the competition of foreign labour, spelt only one word to English manufacturers, and that was ruin. The bugbear of higher wages, immediate, threatening, near, the terror of the last thirty years, closed the prospect for Charles Chafe; he could see nothing beyond. He did not say so, but to him the prosperity of the British manufacturer was bound up in the indigence of the operative. Thriving workmen, doing well, and looking to do better, rose before him in terms of menace, though their prosperity might be rooted in his own. "Give them cheap food and keep them poor," was the sum of his advice. His opinions had the emphasis of the unexpected, the unnatural: he was one of the people whom Wallingham's scheme in its legitimate development of a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact, which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business had survived free trade—though he would not say this either—and he preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies—Mr Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He reversed the figure and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all the argument he wanted.

Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England. The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his own case he freely translated into his country's, and offered an open mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what nature intended to be the eye of a practical businessman. He looked at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation. Hesketh's open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same thing.

Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph. Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian read the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.

"As an Englishman," said Hesketh one evening as they walked together back from the Chafes' along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, "I could wish the idea were more our own—that we were pressing it on the colonies instead of the colonies pressing it on us."

"Doesn't there come a time in the history of most families," Lorne replied, "when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them in touch with the times? Why shouldn't a vigorous policy of Empire be conceived by its younger nations—who have the ultimate resources to carry it out? We've got them and we know it—the iron and the coal and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of forty million people, whom she can't feed and is less and less able to find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment—a penalty. It's something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it, something to bargain with; but even as a market it can't preponderate always, and I can't see why it should make such tremendous claims."

"England isn't superannuated yet, Murchison."

"Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn't as young as she was, and it does seem to me—"

"What seems to you?"

"Well, I'm no economist, and I don't know how far to trust my impressions, and you needn't tell me I'm a rank outsider, for I know that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it's from the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this country has got to come. England still has military initiative, though it's hard to see how she's going to keep that unless she does something to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but what other kind do we hear about? Company-promoting, bee-keeping, asparagus-growing, poultry-farming for ladies, the opening of a new Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four and six, and Japanese attendants who take the change on their hands and knees. London's one great stomach—how many eating places have we passed in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new ways of making rich people more comfortable and better-amused—I'm fed up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on 'em, wooden-smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend the money there is in the country already; and about the only line of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that accumulation. London isn't the headquarters for big new developing enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices, and shops. That sort of thing can't go on for ever. Already capital is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in—steel works in Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa? Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that's a fact; the money will go, and the people will go, anyhow. It's only a case of whether England sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she lets them slip away in spite of her."

"I dare say it will," replied Hesketh; "I've got precious little, but what there is I'd take out fast enough, if I saw a decent chance of investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or three fellows in my year went over there and aren't making half a bad thing of it."

"Oh, come," said Lorne, half-swinging round upon the other, with his hands in his pockets, "it isn't exactly the time, is it, to talk about chucking the Empire?"

"Well, no, it isn't," Hesketh admitted. "One might do better to wait, I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to Wallingham."

They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out again.

"I suppose it's unreasonable, but there's nothing I hate so much as to hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States."

"It's risky, I admit. And I've never heard anybody yet say it was comfortable."

"In a few years, fifty maybe, it won't matter. Things will have taken their direction by then; but now it's a question of the lead. The Americans think they've got it, and unless we get imperial federation of course they have. It's their plain intention to capture England commercially."

"We're a long way from that," said Hesketh.

"Yes, but it's in the line of fate. Industrial energy is deserting this country; and you have no large movement, no counter-advance, to make against the increasing forces that are driving this way from over there—nothing to oppose to assault. England is in a state of siege, and doesn't seem to know it. She's so great—Hesketh, it's pathetic!—she offers an undefended shore to attack, and a stupid confidence, a kindly blindness, above all to Americans, whom she patronizes in the gate."

"I believe we do patronize them," said Hesketh. "It's rotten bad form."

"Oh, form! I may be mad, but one seems to see in politics over here a lack of definition and purpose, a tendency to cling to the abstract and to precedent—'the mainstay of the mandarin' one of the papers calls it; that's a good word—that give one the feeling that this kingdom is beginning to be aware of some influence stronger than its own. It lies, of course, in the great West, where the corn and the cattle grow; and between Winnipeg and Chicago choose quickly, England!"

His companion laughed. "Oh, I'm with you," he said, "but you take a pessimistic view of this country, Murchison."

"It depends on what you call pessimism," Lorne rejoined. "I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world. and the Mecca of the race."



CHAPTER XVII

The Cruickshank deputation returned across that North Atlantic which it was their desire to see so much more than ever the track of the flag, toward the middle of July. The shiny carriages were still rolling about in great numbers when they left; London's air of luxury had thickened with the advancing season and hung heavily in the streets; people had begun to picnic in the Park on Sundays. They had been from the beginning a source of wonder and of depression to Lorne Murchison, the people in the Park, those, I mean, who walked and sat and stood there for the refreshment of their lives, for whom the place has a lyrical value as real as it is unconscious. He noted them ranged on formal benches, quiet, respectable, absorptive, or gathered heavily, shoulder to shoulder, docile under the tutelage of policemen, listening to anyone who would lift a voice to speak to them. London, beating on all borders, hemmed them in; England outside seemed hardly to contain for them a wider space. Lorne, with his soul full of free airs and forest depths, never failed to respond to a note in the Park that left him heavy-hearted, longing for an automatic distributing system for the Empire. When he saw them bring their spirit-lamps and kettles and sit down in little companies on four square yards of turf, under the blackened branches, in the roar of the traffic, he went back to Bloomsbury to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live with that enduring spectacle.

They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their faces to the West again. The unready conception of things, the political concentration upon parish affairs, the cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them with its dull anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish overpopulation clouded their eager outlook. These conditions might have been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison was the only one who thanked Heaven consciously that it was not so; but there was no man among them whose pulse did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the deck of the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool, because he had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of staying, of "settling," though such a course was practicable to any of them except Lorne. They were all rich enough to take the advantages that money brings in England, the comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add their wealth to the sumptuous side of the dramatic contrast. I doubt whether the idea even presented itself. It is the American who takes up his appreciative residence in England. He comes as a foreigner, observant, amused, having disclaimed responsibility for a hundred years. His detachment is as complete as it would be in Italy, with the added pleasure of easy comprehension. But homecomers from Greater Britain have never been cut off, still feel their uneasy share in all that is, and draw a long breath of relief as they turn again to their life in the lands where they found wider scope and different opportunities, and that new quality in the blood which made them different men.

The deputation had accomplished a good deal; less, Cruickshank said, than he had hoped, but more than he had expected. They had obtained the promise of concessions for Atlantic services, both mail and certain classes of freight, by being able to demonstrate a generous policy on their own side. Pacific communications the home Government was more chary of; there were matters to be fought out with Australia. The Pacific was further away, as Cruickshank said, and you naturally can't get fellows who have never been there to see the country under the Selkirks and south of the Bay—any of them except Wallingham, who had never been there either, but whose imagination took views of the falcon. They were reinforced by news of a shipping combination in Montreal to lower freights to South Africa against the Americans; it wasn't news to them, some of them were in it; but it was to the public, and it helped the sentiment of their aim, the feather on the arrow. They had secured something, both financially and morally; what best pleased them, perhaps, was the extent to which they got their scheme discussed. Here Lorne had been invaluable; Murchison had done more with the newspapers, they agreed, than any of them with Cabinet Ministers. The journalist everywhere is perhaps more accessible to ideas, more susceptible to enthusiasm, than his fellows, and Lorne was charged with the object of his deputation in its most communicable, most captivating form. At all events, he came to excellent understanding, whether of agreement or opposition, with the newspapermen he met—Cruickshank knew a good many of them and these occasions were more fruitful than the official ones—and there is no doubt that the guarded approval of certain leading columns had fewer ifs and buts and other qualifications in consequence, while the disapproval of others was marked by a kind of unwilling sympathy and a freely accorded respect. Lorne found London editors surprisingly unbiased, London newspapers surprisingly untrammelled. They seemed to him to suffer from no dictated views, no interests in the background or special local circumstances. They had open minds, most of them, and when a cloud appeared it was seldom more than a prejudice. It was only his impression, and perhaps it would not stand cynical inquiry; but he had a grateful conviction that the English Press occupied in the main a lofty and impartial ground of opinion, from which it desired only a view of the facts in their true proportion. On his return he confided it to Horace Williams, who scoffed and ran the national politics of the Express in the local interests of Fox County as hard as ever; but it had fallen in with Lorne's beautiful beliefs about England, and he clung to it for years.