The Imperialist

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

  “Well, considering it’s your own son, I think you might show a little more confidence,” said Mrs. Murchison. “No thank you; no dessert for me. With a member of the family being elected – or not – for a seat in Parliament, I’m not the one to want dessert.”

  Between Mr. Murchison and the milkman that morning, Mrs. Murchison felt almost too much tried by the superior capacity for reticence.

  It was seven in the evening before the ballot-boxes were all in the hands of the sheriff, and nine before that officer found it necessary to let the town know that it had piled up a majority of three hundred for Walter Winter. He was not a supporter of Walter Winter, and he preferred to wait until the returns began to come in from Clayfield and the townships, in the hope that they would make the serious difference that was required of them. The results were flashed one after the other to the total from the windows of the Express and the Mercury upon the cheering crowd that gathered in Market Square. There were moments of wild elation, moments of deep suspense upon both sides, but when the final addition and subtraction was made the enthusiastic voters of South Fox, including Jim Whelan, who had neglected no further opportunity, read, with yells and groans, hurrahs and catcalls, that they had elected Mr. Lorne Murchison to the Dominion House of Commons by a majority of seventy.

  Then the band began to play and all the tin whistles to rejoice. Young and Windle had the grace to blow their sirens, and across the excited darkness of the town came the long familiar boom of the Murchison Stove Works. Every Liberal in Elgin who had any means of making a noise made it. From the window of the Association committee-room their young fellow-townsman thanked them for the honour they had done him, while his mother sat in the cab he had brought her down in and applauded vigorously between tears, and his father took congratulations from a hundred friendly hands. They all went home in a torchlight procession, the band always playing, the tin whistles always performing; and it was two in the morning before the occasion could in any sense be said to be over.

  Lights burned quite as late, however, in the Conservative committee room, where matters were being arranged to bark threateningly at the heels of victory next day. Victory looked like something that might be made to turn and parley. A majority of seventy was too small for finality. Her attention was called without twenty-four hours’ delay to a paragraph in the Elgin Mercury, plainly authoritative, to the effect that the election of Mr. Murchison would be immediately challenged, on the ground of the infringement in the electoral district of Moneida of certain provisions of the Ontario Elections Act with the knowledge and consent of the candidate, whose claim to the contested seat, it was confidently expected, would be rendered within a very short time null and void.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “You can never trust an Indian,” said Mrs. Murchison at the anxious family council. “Well do I remember them when you were a little thing, Advena, hanging round the town on a market-day; and the squaws coming to the back door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt –! But I thought they were all gone long ago.”

  “There are enough of them left to make trouble all right,” said Alec. “They don’t dress up like they used to, and I guess they send the papooses to kindergarten now; but you’ll find plenty of them lying around any time there’s nothing to do but vote and get drunk.”

  Allowing for the natural exaggeration of partisanship, the facts about the remaining red man of Moneida were much as Alec described them. On market-days he slid easily, unless you looked twice, into what the Express continues to call the farming community. Invariably, if you did look twice, you would note that his stiff felt hat was an inch taller in the crown than those worn generally by the farming community, the pathetic assertion, perhaps, of an old sovereignty; invariably, too, his coat and trousers betrayed a form within, which, in the effort at adaptation, had become high-shouldered and lank of leg. And the brown skin was there to be noticed, though you might pass it by, and the high cheek-bones and the liquidly muddy eye. He had taken on the sign of civilization at the level which he occupied; the farming community had lent him its look of shrewdness in small bargains and its rakish sophistication in garments, nor could you always assume with certainty, except at Fox County fairs and elections, that he was intoxicated. So much Government had done for him in Fox County, where the “Reservation,” nursing the dying fragment of his race, testified that there is such a thing as political compunction. Out in the wide spaces of the West he still protects his savagery; they know an Indian there to-day as far as they can see him, without a second glance.

  And in Moneida, upon polling-days, he still, as Alec said, “made trouble.” Perhaps it would be more to the fact to say that he presented the elements of which trouble is made. Civilization had given him a vote, not with his coat and trousers, but shortly after; and he had not yet learned to keep it anywhere but in his pocket, whence the transfer was easy, and could be made in different ways. The law contemplated only one, the straight drop into the ballot-box; but the “boys” had other views. The law represented one level of political sentiment, the boys represented another; both parties represented the law, both parties were represented by the boys; and on the occasion of the South Fox election the boys had been active in Moneida. There are, as we know, two kinds of activity on these occasions, one being set to observe the other; and Walter Winter’s boys, while presumably neglecting no legitimate opportunity of their own, claimed to have been highly successful in detecting the methods of the other side.

  The Indians owed their holdings, their allowances, their school, and their protecting superintendent, Squire Ormiston, to a Conservative Government. It made a grateful bond of which a later Conservative Government was not, perhaps, unaware, when it added the ballot to its previous benefits. The Indians, therefore, on election-days, were supposed to “go solid” for the candidate in whom they had been taught to see good-will. If they did not go quite solid, the other side might point to the evolution of the political idea in every dissentient – a gladdening spectacle, indeed, on which, however, the other side seldom showed any desire to dwell.

  Hitherto the desires and intentions of the “Reserve” had been exemplified in its superintendent. Squire Ormiston had never led his wards to the polls – there were strong reasons against that. But the squire made no secret of his politics, either before or, unluckily, after he changed them. The Indians had always known that they were voting on the same side as “de boss.” They were likely, the friends of Mr. Winter thought, to know now that they were voting on a different side. This was the secret of Mr. Winter’s friends’ unusual diligence on voting-day in Moneida. The mere indication of a wish on the part of the superintendent would constitute undue influence in the eye of the law. The squire was not the most discreet of men – often before it had been the joke of Conservative councils how near the old man had come to making a case for the Grits in connection with this chief or that. I will not say that he was acquainted with the famous letter from Queen Victoria, affectionately bidding her Indian children to vote for the Conservative candidate. But perhaps he had not adhered to the strictest interpretation of the law which gave him fatherly influence in everything pertaining to his red-skinned charges’ interests, temporal and spiritual, excepting only their sacred privilege of the ballot. He may even have held it in some genial derision, their sacred privilege; it would be natural, he had been there among them in unquestioned authority so long. Now it had assumed an importance. The squire looked at it with the ardour of a converted eye. When he told Mr. Farquharson that he could bring Moneida with him to a Liberal victory, he thought and spoke of the farmers of the township, not of his wards of the Reserve. Yet as the day approached these would infallibly become voters in his eyes, to swell or to di
minish the sum of Moneida’s loyalty to the Empire. They remembered all this in the committee-room of his old party. “The squire,” they said to one another, “will give himself away this time if ever he did.” Then young Murchison hadn’t known any better than to spend the best part of the day out there, and there were a dozen witnesses to swear that old Ormiston introduced him to three or four of the chiefs. That was basis enough for the boys detailed to watch Moneida, basis enough in the end for a petition constructed to travel to the High Court at Toronto for the purpose of rendering null and void the election of Mr. Lorne Murchison, and transferring the South Fox seat to the candidate of the opposite party.

  That possibility had been promptly frustrated by a cross petition. There was enough evidence in Subdivision Eleven, according to Bingham, to void the Tory returns on six different counts; but the house-cat sold by Peter Finnigan to Mr. Winter for five dollars would answer all practical purposes. It was a first-rate mouser, Bingham said, and it would settle Winter. They would have plenty of other charges “good and ready” if Finnigan’s cat should fail them, but Bingham didn’t think the court would get to anything else; he had great confidence in the cat.

  The petitions had been lodged with promptness. “Evi dence,” as Mr. Winter remarked, “is like a good many other things – better when it’s hot, especially the kind you get on the Reserve.” To which, when he heard it, Bingham observed sarcastically that the cat would keep. The necessary thousand dollars were ready on each side the day after the election, lodged in court the next. Counsel were as promptly engaged – the Liberals selected Cruickshank – and the suit against the elected candidate, beginning with charges against his agents in the town, was shortly in full hearing before the judges sent from Toronto to try it. Meanwhile the Elgin Mercury had shown enterprise in getting hold of Moneida evidence, and foolhardiness, as the Express pointed out, in publishing it before the matter was reached in court. There was no foolhardiness in printing what the Express knew about Finnigan’s cat; it was just a common cat, and Walter Winter paid five dollars for it, Finnigan declaring that if Mr. Winter hadn’t filled him up with bad whisky before the bargain, he wouldn’t have let her go under ten, he was that fond of the creature. The Express pointed out that this was grasping of Finnigan, as the cat had never left him, and Mr. Winter showed no intention of taking her away; but there was nothing sub judice about the cat. Finnigan, before he sobered up, had let her completely out of the bag. It was otherwise with the charges that were to be made, according to the Mercury, on the evidence of Chief Joseph Fry and another member of his tribe, to the effect that he and his Conservative friends had been instructed by Squire Ormiston and Mr. Murchison to vote on this occasion for both the candidates, thereby producing, when the box was opened, eleven ballot-papers inscribed with two crosses instead of one, and valueless. Here, should the charges against a distinguished and highly respected Government official fail, as in the opinion of the Express they undoubtedly would fail, of substantiation, was a big libel case all dressed and ready and looking for the Mercury office. “Foolish – foolish,” wrote Mr. Williams at the close of his editorial comments. “Very ill-advised.”

  “They’ve made no case so far,” Mr. Murchison assured the family. “I saw Williams on my way up, and he says the evidence of that corner grocery fellow – what’s his name? – went all to pieces this morning. Oliver was in court. He says one of the judges – Hooke – lost his patience altogether.”

  “They won’t do anything with the town charges,” Alec said, “and they know it. They’re saving themselves for Moneida and old man Ormiston.”

  “Well, I heartily wish,” said Mrs. Murchison, in a tone of grievance with the world at large, and if you were not responsible you might keep out of the way – “I heartily wish that Lorne had stayed at home that day and not got mixed up with old man Ormiston.”

  “They’ll find it pretty hard to fix anything on Lorne,” said Alec. “But I guess the squire did go off his head a little.”

  “Have they anything more than Indian evidence?” asked Advena.

  “We don’t know what they’ve got,” said her brother darkly, “and we won’t till Wednesday, when they expect to get round to it.”

  “Indian evidence will be a poor dependence in Cruickshank’s hands,” Mr. Murchison told them, with a chuckle. “They say this Chief Joseph Fry is going about complaining that he always got three dollars for one vote before, and this time he expected six for two, and got nothing!”

  “Chief Joseph Fry!” exclaimed Alec. “They make me tired with their Chief Josephs and Chief Henrys! White Clam Shell – that was the name he got when he wasn’t christened.”

  “That’s the name,” remarked Advena, “that he probably votes under.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Murchison, “it was very kind of Squire Ormiston to give Lorne his support, but it seems to me that as far as Moneida is concerned he would have done better alone.”

  “No, I guess he wouldn’t, mother,” said Alec. “Moneida came right round with the squire, outside the Reserve. If it hadn’t been for the majority there we would have lost the election. The old man worked hard, and Lorne is grateful to him, and so he ought to be.”

  “If they carry the case against Lorne,” said Stella, “he’ll be disqualified for seven years.”

  “Only if they prove him personally mixed up in it,” said the father. “And that,” he added, with a concentration of family sentiment in the emphasis of it, “they’ll not do.”

  THIRTY-TWO

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

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

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

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