“It is good to have you in my life,” he said. “It is also good to recognize one’s possibilities.”
“How can you definitely lose me?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t know. Now that I have found you it is as if you and I had been rocked together on the tide of that inconceivable ocean that casts us half awake upon life,” he said dreamily. “It isn’t a friendship of ideas, it’s a friendship of spirit. Indeed, I hope and pray never wholly to lose that.”
“You never will,” she told him. “How many worlds one lives in as the day goes by with the different people one cares for – one beyond the other, concentric, ringing from the heart! Yours comprises all the others; it lies the farthest out – and alas! at present, the closest in,” she added irresistibly to the asking of his eyes.
“But,” she hurried on, taking high ground to remedy her indiscretion, “I look forward to the time when this – other feeling of ours will become just an idea, as it is now just an emotion, at which we should try to smile. It is the attitude of the gods.”
“And therefore not becoming to men. Why should we, not being gods, borrow their attitude?” said Finlay.
“I could never kill it,” she put her work in her lap to say, “by any sudden act of violence. It would seem a kind of suicide. While it rules it is like one’s life – absolute. But to isolate it – to place it beyond the currents from the heart – to look at it, and realize it, and conquer it for what it is – I don’t think it need take so very long. And then our friendship will be beautiful without reproach.”
“I sometimes fear there may not be time enough in life,” he said. “And if I find that I must simply go – to British Columbia, I think – those mining missions would give a man his chance against himself. There is splendid work to be done there, of a rough-and-ready kind that would make it puerile to spend time in self-questioning.”
She smiled as if at a violent boy. “We can do it. We can do it here,” she said. “May I quote another religion to you? ‘From purification there arises in the Yogi a thorough discernment of the cause and nature of the body, whereupon he loses that regard which others have for the bodily form.’ Then, if he loves, he loves in spirit and in truth. I look forward to the time,” she went on calmly, “when the best that I can give you or you can give me will ride upon a glance.”
“I used to feel more drawn to the ascetic achievement and its rewards,” he remarked thoughtfully, “than I do now.”
“If I were not a Presbyterian in Canada,” she told him, “I would be a Buddhist in Burma. But I have inherited the Shorter Catechism; I must remain without the Law.”
Finlay smiled. “They are the simple,” he said. “Our Law makes wise the simple.”
Advena looked for a moment into the fire. She was listening, with admiration, to her heart; she would not be led to consider esoteric contrasts of East and West.
“Isn’t there something that appeals to you,” she said, “in the thought of just leaving it, all unsaid and all undone, a dear and tender projection upon the future that faded – a lovely thing we turned away from, until one day it was no longer there?”
“Charming,” he said, averting his eyes so that she should not see the hunger in them. “Charming – literature!”
She smiled and sighed, and he wrenched his mind to the consideration of the Buddhism of Browning. She followed him obediently, but the lines they wanted did not come easily; they were compelled to search and verify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly, realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight. They looked for verses to prove that Browning’s imagination carried him bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.
And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management, and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. “Would it be the heroic-in-little,” she begged, “to let me mend that?”
As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan for his admonition. “‘What then art thou doing here, O imagination?’” he groaned in his private heart. “‘Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I am not angry with thee, only go away!’”
TWENTY-FIVE
Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire would be bad for her lover’s political prospects till she made him feel his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her own comfort in the family circle, Mr. Milburn having grown by this time quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of the ring – imagine, for an instant, if she had been wearing it now! She would have banished Lorne altogether if she could. As he insisted on an occasional meeting, she clothed it in mystery, appointing it for an evening when her mother and aunt were out, and answering his ring at the door herself. To her family she remarked with detachment that you saw hardly anything of Lorne Murchison now, he was so taken up with his old election; and to Hesketh she confided her fear that politics did interfere with friendship, whatever he might say. He said a good deal, he cited lofty examples; but the only agreement he could get from her was the hope that the estrangement wouldn’t be permanent.
“But you are going to say something, Lorne,” she insisted, talking of the Jordanville meeting.
“Not much,” he told her. “It’s the safest district we’ve got, and they adore old Farquharson. He’ll do most of the talking – they wouldn’t thank me for taking up the time. Farquharson is going to tell them I’m a first-class man, and they couldn’t do better, and I’m practically only to show my face and tell them I think so too.”
“But Mr. Hesketh will speak?”
“Yes; we thought it would be a good chance of testing him. He may interest them, and he can’t do much harm, anyhow.”
“Lorne, I should simply love to go. It’s your first meeting.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Mr. Murchison, have you taken leave of your senses? Really, you are –”
“All right, I’ll send you. Farquharson and I are going out to the Crow place to supper, but Hesketh is driving straight there. He’ll be delighted to bring you – who wouldn’t?”
“I shouldn’t be allowed to go with him alone,” said Dora, thoughtfully.
“Well, no. I don’t know that I’d approve of that myself,” laughed the confident young man. “Hesketh is driving Mrs. Farquharson, and the cutter will easily hold three. Isn’t it lucky there’s sleighing?”
“Mother couldn’t object to that,” said Dora. “Lorne, I always said you were the dearest fellow! I’ll wear a thick veil, and not a soul will know me.”
“Not a soul would in any case,” said Lorne. “It’ll be a Jordanville crowd, you know – nobody from Elgin.”
“We don’t visit much in Jordanville, certainly. Well, mother mayn’t object. She has
a great idea of Mrs. Farquharson, because she has attended eleven Drawing-Rooms at Ottawa, and one of them was given – held, I should say – by the Princess Louise.”
“I won’t promise you eleven,” said Lorne, “but there seems to be a pretty fair chance of one or two.”
At this she had a tale for him which charmed his ears. “I didn’t know where to look,” she said. “Aunt Emmie, you know, has a very bad trick of coming into my room without knocking. Well, in she walked last night, and found me before the glass practising my curtsey! I could have killed her. Pretended she thought I was out.”
“Dora, would you like me to promise something?” he asked, with a mischievous look.
“Of course, I would. I don’t care how much you promise. What?”
But already he repented of his daring, and sat beside her suddenly conscious and abashed. Nor could any teasing prevail to draw from him what had been on his audacious lips to say.
Social precedents are easily established in the country. The accident that sent the first Liberal canvasser for Jordanville votes to the Crow place for his supper would be hard to discover now; the fact remains that he has been going there ever since. It made a greater occasion than Mrs. Crow would ever have dreamed of acknowledging. She saw to it that they had a good meal of victuals, and affected indifference to the rest; they must say their say, she supposed. If the occasion had one satisfaction which she came nearer to confessing than another, it was that the two or three substantial neighbours who usually came to meet the politicians left their wives at home, and that she herself, to avoid giving any offence on this score, never sat down with the men. Quite enough to do it was, she would explain later, for her and the hired girl to wait on them and to clear up after them. She and Bella had their bite afterward when the men had hitched up, and when they could exchange comments of proud congratulation upon the inroads on the johnny-cake or the pies. So there was no ill feeling, and Mrs. Crow, having vindicated her dignity by shaking hands with the guests of the evening in the parlour, solaced it further by maintaining the masculine state of the occasion, in spite of protests or entreaties. To sit down opposite Mr. Crow would have made it ordinary “company;” she passed the plates and turned it into a function.
She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the yard with the horses. She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life. Her wiry hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting: you could tell by the look of them that they were not often crossed there. They were strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long, and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that would have given a phrenologist his opportunity. It was a different Mrs. Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs. Crow, the sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.
The room was heated to express the geniality that was harder to put in words. The window was shut; there was a smell of varnish and whatever was inside the “suite” of which Mrs. Crow occupied the sofa. Enlarged photographs – very much enlarged – of Mr. and Mrs. Crow hung upon the walls, and one other of a young girl done in that process which tells you at once that she was an only daughter and that she is dead. There had been other bereavements; they were written upon the silver coffin-plates which, framed and glazed, also contributed to the decoration of the room; but you would have had to look close, and you might feel a delicacy.
Mrs. Crow made her greetings with precision, and sat down again upon the sofa for a few minutes’ conversation.
“I’m telling them,” said her husband, “that the sleighin’s just held out for them. If it ’ud been to-morrow they’d have had to come on wheels. Pretty soft travellin’ as it was, some places, I guess.”
“Snow’s come early this year,” said Mrs. Crow. “It was an open fall, too.”
“It has certainly,” Mr. Farquharson backed her up. “About as early as I remember it. I don’t know how much you got out here; we had a good foot in Elgin.”
“’Bout the same, ’bout the same,” Mr. Crow deliberated, “but it’s been layin’ light all along over Clayfield way – ain’t had a pair of runners out, them folks.”
“Makes a more cheerful winter, Mrs. Crow, don’t you think, when it comes early?” remarked Lorne. “Or would you rather not get it till after Christmas?”
“I don’t know as it matters much, out here in the country. We don’t get a great many folks passin’, best of times. An’ it’s more of a job to take care of the stock.”
“That’s so,” Mr. Crow told them. “Chores come heavier when there’s snow on the ground, a great sight, especially if there’s drifts.”
And for an instant, with his knotted hands hanging between his knees, he pondered this unvarying aspect of his yearly experience. They all pondered it, sympathetic.
“Well, now, Mr. Farquharson,” Mrs. Crow turned to him. “An’ how reely be ye? We’ve heard better, an’ worse, an’ middlin’ – there’s ben such contradictory reports.”
“Oh, very well, Mrs. Crow! Never better. I’m going to give a lot more trouble yet. I can’t do it in politics, that’s the worst of it. But here’s the man that’s going to do it for me. Here’s the man!”
The Crows looked at the pretendant, as in duty bound, but not any longer than they could help.
“Why, I guess you were at school with Elmore?” said Crow, as if the idea had just struck him.
“He may be right peart, for all that,” said Elmore’s mother, and Elmore, himself, entering with two leading Liberals of Jordanville, effected a diversion, under cover of which Mrs. Crow escaped, to superintend, with Bella, the last touches to the supper in the kitchen.
Politics in and about Jordanville were accepted as a purely masculine interest. If you had asked Mrs. Crow to take a hand in them she would have thanked you with sarcasm, and said she thought she had about enough to do as it was. The school-house, on the night of such a meeting as this, was recognized to be no place for ladies. It was a man’s affair, left to the men, and the appearance there of the other sex would have been greeted with remark and levity. Elgin, as we know, was more sophisticated in every way, plenty of ladies attended political meetings in the Drill Shed, where seats as likely as not would be reserved for them; plenty of handkerchiefs waved there for the encouragement of the hero of the evening. They did not kiss him; British phlegm, so far, had stayed that demonstration at the southern border.
The ladies of Elgin, however, drew the line somewhere, drew it at country meetings. Mrs. Farquharson went with her husband because, since his state of health had handed him over to her more than ever, she saw it a part of her wifely duty. His retirement had been decided upon for the spring, but she would be on hand to retire him at any earlier moment should the necessity arise. “We’ll be the only female creatures there, my dear,” she had said to Dora on the way out, and Hesketh had praised them both for public spirit. He didn’t know, he said, how anybody would get elected in England without the ladies, especially in the villages, where the people were obliged to listen respectfully.
“I wonder you can afford to throw away all the influence you get in the rural districts with soup and blankets,” he said; “but this is an extravagant country in many ways.” Dora kept silence, not being sure of the social prestige bound up with the distribution of soup and blankets, but Mrs. Farquharson set him sharply right.
“I guess we’d rather do without our influence if it came to that,” she said.
Hesketh listened with deference to her account of the rural district which had as yet produced n
o Ladies Bountiful, made mental notes of several points, and placed her privately as a woman of more than ordinary intelligence. I have always claimed for Hesketh an open mind; he was filling it now, to its capacity, with care and satisfaction.
The school-room was full and waiting when they arrived. Jordanville had been well billed, and the posters held, in addition to the conspicuous names of Farquharson and Murchison, that of Mr. Alfred Hesketh (of London, England). There was a “send-off” to give to the retiring member, there was a critical inspection to make of the new candidate, and there was Mr. Alfred Hesketh, of London, England, and whatever he might signify. They were big, quiet, expectant fellows, with less sophistication and polemic than their American counterparts, less stolid aggressiveness than their parallels in England, if they have parallels there. They stood, indeed, for the development between the two; they came of the new country but not of the new light; they were democrats who had never thrown off the monarch – what harm did he do there overseas? They had the air of being prosperous, but not prosperous enough for theories and doctrines. The Liberal vote of South Fox had yet to be split by Socialism or Labour. Life was a decent rough business that required all their attention; there was time enough for sleep but not much for speculation. They sat leaning forward with their hats dropped between their knees, more with the air of big schoolboys expecting an entertainment than responsible electors come together to approve their party’s choice. They had the uncomplaining bucolic look, but they wore it with a difference; the difference, by this time, was enough to mark them of another nation. Most of them had driven to the meeting; it was not an adjournment from the public-house. Nor did the air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider, and the room was full of patient good-will.
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