The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had supped with the speakers, and Mr. Crow had given him a friendly hint that the boys wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of trimmings from him. Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr. Farquharson. It diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate by their own school-house. He approached them, as he had always done, on the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual friendly business. “You know and I know,” he said more than once; they and he knew a number of things together.
He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn’t chased him out of politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the main heads of that attractive prospect, and, agreeable as the subject, great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his successor for this constituency, Mr. Lorne Murchison, and by his friend from the old country, Mr. Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take the words out of the mouth of these gentlemen, much as he envied them the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that illustrious body of literary and scientific men, had a custom, on the death of a member and the selection of his successor, of appointing one of their number to eulogize the new-comer. The person upon whom the task would most appropriately fall, did circumstances permit, would be the departing academician. In this case, he was happy to say, circumstances did permit – his political funeral was still far enough off to enable him to express his profound confidence in and his hearty admiration of the young and vigorous political heir whom the Liberals of South Fox had selected to stand in his shoes. Mr. Farquharson proceeded to give his grounds for this confidence and admiration, reminding the Jordanville electors that they had met Mr. Murchison as a Liberal standard-bearer in the last general election, when he, Farquharson, had to acknowledge very valuable services on Mr. Murchison’s part. The retiring member then thanked his audience for the kind attention and support they had given him for so many years, made a final cheerful joke about a Pagan divinity known as Anno Domini, and took his seat.
They applauded him, and it was plain that they regretted him, the tried friend, the man there was never any doubt about, whose convictions they had repeated, and whose speeches in Parliament they had read with a kind of proprietorship for so long. The Chair had to wait, before introducing Mr. Alfred Hesketh, until the back benchers had got through with a double rendering of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which bolder spirits, from the anteroom where the little girls kept their hats and comforters, interspersed with whoops. Hesketh, it had been arranged, should speak next, and Lorne last.
Mr. Hesketh left his wooden chair with smiling ease, the ease which is intended to level distinctions and put everybody concerned on the best of terms. He said that though he was no stranger to the work of political campaigns, this was the first time that he had had the privilege of addressing a colonial audience. “I consider,” said he handsomely, “that it is a privilege.” He clasped his hands behind his back and threw out his chest.
“Opinions have differed in England as to the value of the colonies, and the consequence of colonials. I say here with pride that I have ever been among those who insist that the value is very high and the consequence very great. The fault is common to humanity, but we are, I fear, in England, too prone to be led away by appearances, and to forget that under a rough unpolished exterior may beat virtues which are the brightest ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from the Algonquins and the – and the other savages – may be hidden the most glorious period of the British race.”
Mr. Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality as it offered itself to them – it was a thing new and strange. Far out in the North-West, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all the summer, Hesketh’s would have been a voice from home; but here, in long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.
“If we in England,” Hesketh proceeded, “required a lesson – as perhaps we did – in the importance of the colonies, we had it, need I remind you? in the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and victories to the British cause.”
Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive comment – “Yah!”
Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation –
“What should they know of England
Who only England know?”
which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear. His audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment. The same voice from the ante-room inquired ironically, “That so?” and the speaker felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.
He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had at heart – the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the mother country. He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having shown themselves capable of this great function – a point at which he was again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother country in time of war. Here he quoted a noble lord. He said that he believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to have nothing to do with it.
“England,” he said, loftily, “has no wish to buy the loyalty of her colonies, nor, I hope, has any colony the desire to offer her allegiance at the price of preference in British markets. Even proposals for mutual commercial benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier principles than those of the market-place and the counting-house.”
/> At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher commercial plane, exclaimed, “How be ye goin’ to get ’em kept to, then?”
Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the audience asked how they were to ensure that such arrangements would be adhered to. His answer was in the words of the Duke of Dartmoor, “By the mutual esteem, the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of the British race.”
Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless, at his own incapacity to follow this high doctrine, exclaimed intemperately, “Oh, shut up!” and the gathering, remembering that this, after all, was not what it had come for, began to hint that it had had enough in intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for “Murchison!”
Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer. He had a trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he thought they would take as a direct message from the distinguished nobleman who had uttered it. The Marquis of Aldeburgh was the father of the pithy thing, which he had presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The audience received it with respect – Hesketh’s own respect was so marked – but with misapprehension; there had been too many allusions to the nobility for a community so far removed from its soothing influence. “Had ye no friends among the commoners?” suddenly spoke up a dry old fellow, stroking a long white beard; and the roar that greeted this showed the sense of the meeting. Hesketh closed with assurances of the admiration and confidence he felt towards the candidate proposed to their suffrages by the Liberal party that were quite inaudible, and sought his yellow pinewood schoolroom chair with rather a forced smile. It had been used once before that day to isolate conspicuous stupidity.
They were at bottom a good-natured and a loyal crowd, and they had not, after all, come there to make trouble, or Mr. Alfred Hesketh might have carried away a worse opinion of them. As it was, young Murchison, whose address occupied the rest of the evening, succeeded in making an impression upon them distinct enough, happily for his personal influence, to efface that of his friend. He did it by the simple expedient of talking business, and as high prices for produce and low ones for agricultural implements would be more interesting there than here, I will not report him. He and Mr. Farquharson waited, after the meeting, for a personal word with a good many of those present, but it was suggested to Hesketh that the ladies might be tired, and that he had better get them home without unnecessary delay. Mrs. Farquharson had less comment to offer during the drive home than Hesketh thought might be expected from a woman of her intelligence, but Miss Milburn was very enthusiastic. She said he had made a lovely speech, and she wished her father could have heard it.
A personal impression, during a time of political excitement, travels unexpectedly far. A week later Mr. Hesketh was concernedly accosted in Main Street by a boy on a bicycle.
“Say, mister, how’s the dook?”
“What duke?” asked Hesketh, puzzled.
“Oh, any dook,” responded the boy, and bicycled cheerfully away.
TWENTY-SIX
Christmas came and went. Dr. Drummond had long accepted the innovation of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive by his business instinct, in everything but theology, where perhaps his business instinct also operated the other way, in favour of the sure thing. The Christmas Day service soon became one of those “special” occasions so dear to his heart, which made a demand upon him out of the ordinary way. He rose to these on the wing of the eagle, and his congregation never lacked the lesson that could be most dramatically drawn from them. His Christmas Day discourse gathered everything into it that could emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints’ days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and principle relentlessly indicated. Dr. Drummond loved, as I have said, all that asked for notable comment; the poet and the tragedian in him caught at the opportunity, and revelled in it. Public events carried him far, especially if they were disastrous, but what he most profited by was the dealing of Providence with members of his own congregation. Of all the occasions that inspired him, the funeral sermon was his happiest opportunity, nor was it, in his hands, by any means unstinted eulogy. Candid was his summing-up, behind the decent veil, the accepted apology of death; he was not afraid to refer to the follies of youth or the weaknesses of age in terms as unmistakable as they were kindly.
“Grace,” he said once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, “did more for her than ever nature had done.” He repeated it, too. “She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature,” and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice when the loss he deplored was that of a youth of virtue and promise, or that of a personal friend. His very text would be a blow upon the heart; the eyes filled from the beginning. People would often say that they were “sorry for the family,” sitting through Dr. Drummond’s celebration of their bereavement; and the sympathy was probably well founded. But how fine he was when he paid the last tribute to that upright man, his elder and office-bearer, David Davidson! How his words marched, sorrowing to the close! “Much I have said of him, and more than he would have had me say.” Will it not stay with those who heard it till the very end, the trenchant, mournful fall of that “more than he would have had me say”?
It was a thing that Hugh Finlay could not abide in Dr. Drummond.
As the winter passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr. Drummond liked a pretty definite parallel; he had small opinion of the practice of drawing a pint out of a thimble, as he considered Finlay must have done when he preached the gospel of imperialism from Deuteronomy xxx. 14. “For the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” Moreover, to preach politics in Knox Church was a liberty in Finlay.
The fact that Finlay had been beforehand with him operated perhaps to reconcile the Doctor to his difficulty; and the candidature of one of his own members in what was practically the imperial interest no doubt increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless, he would not lose sight of the matter for more than two or three weeks together. Many an odd blow he delivered for its furtherance by way of illustrating higher things, and he kept it always, so to speak, in the practical politics of the long prayer.
It was Sunday evening, and Abby and her husband, as usual, had come to tea. The family was complete with the exception of Lorne, who had driven out to Clayfield with Horace Williams, to talk over some urgent matters with persons whom he would meet at supper at the Metropole Hotel at Clayfield. It was a thing Mrs. Murchison thought little short of scandalous – supper to talk business on the Sabbath day, and in an hotel, a place of which the smell about the door was enough to knock you down, even on a weekday. Mrs. Murchison considered, and did not scruple to say so, that politics should be let alone on Sundays. Clayfield votes might be very important, but there were such things as commandments, she supposed. “It’ll bring no blessing,” she declared severely, eyeing Lorne’s empty place.
The talk about the lamplit table was, nevertheless, all of the election, blessed or unblessed. It was not in human nature that it shouldn’t be, as Mrs. Murchison would have very quickly told you if
you had found her inconsistent. There was reason in all things, as she frequently said.
“I hear,” Alec had told them, “that Octavius Milburn is going around bragging he’s got the Elgin Chamber of Commerce consolidated this time.”
“Against us?” exclaimed Stella; and her brother said, “Of course!”
“Those Milburns,” remarked Mrs. Murchison, “are enough to make one’s blood boil. I met Mrs. Milburn in the market yesterday; she’d been pricing Mrs. Crow’s ducks, and they were just five cents too dear for her, and she stopped – wonderful thing for her – and had such an amount to say about Lorne, and the honour it was, and the dear only knows what! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth – and Octavius Milburn doing all he knew against him the whole time! That’s the Milburns! I cut her remarkably short,” Mrs. Murchison added, with satisfaction, “and when she’d made up her mind she’d have to give that extra five cents for the ducks because there weren’t any others to be had, she went back and found I’d bought them.”
“Well done, mother!” said Alec, and Oliver remarked that if those were to-day’s ducks they were too good for the Milburn crowd, a lot.
“I expect she wanted them, too,” remarked Stella. “They’ve got the only Mr. Hesketh staying with them now. Miss Filkin’s in a great state of excitement.”
“I guess we can spare them Hesketh,” said John Murchison.
“He’s a lobster,” said Stella with fervour.
“He seems to bring a frost where he goes,” continued Abby’s husband, “in politics, anyhow. I hear Lorne wants to make a present of him to the other side, for use wherever they’ll let him speak longest. Is it true he began his speech out at Jordanville – ‘Gentlemen – and those of you who are not gentlemen’?”
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