From the day she stepped into it Mrs Murchison knew that the Plummer
Place was going to be the bane of her existence. This may have been
partly because Mr Murchison had bought it, since a circumstance welded
like that into one’s life is very apt to assume the character of a bane,
unless one’s temperament leads one to philosophy, which Mrs Murchison’s
didn’t. But there were other reasons more difficult to traverse: it was
plainly true that the place did require a tremendous amount of “looking
after,” as such things were measured in Elgin, far more looking after
than the Murchisons could afford to give it. They could never have
afforded, in the beginning, to possess it had it not been sold, under
mortgage, at a dramatic sacrifice. The house was a dignified old affair,
built of wood and painted white, with wide green verandahs compassing
the four sides of it, as they often did in days when the builder had
only to turn his hand to the forest. It stood on the very edge of
the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and
corn-stacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army. The
plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road or, if you
were so inclined, the river, into which you could throw a stone from
the orchard of the Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in
ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each
side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected
by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that
a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the
middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton,
most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed
air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was
also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a
lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often said,
must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money
to live up to them. The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn,
till a succession of “girls” left on account of the milking, and the
lane was useful as an approach to the backyard by the teams that brought
the cordwood in the winter. It was trying enough for a person with
the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door
circumstances which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison often
declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there.
It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison
in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier,
and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece. She had an icehouse
and a wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected
with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not
one of them was in order. She had far too much, as she declared, for
any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not
dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library
or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted
reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not to put his foot through
it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just
have to drop. The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible
amelioration--it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs
Murchison often wished she could afford to pull it down.
It may be realized that in spite of its air of being impossible
to “overtake”--I must, in this connection, continue to quote its
mistress--there was an attractiveness about the dwelling of the
Murchisons the attractiveness of the large ideas upon which it had
been built and designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced
income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous view to economy
and occupation, to perish of the readjustment. The case of such persons,
when they arrive, is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local
understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be entitled
to respect, but nothing can save them from the isolation of their
difference and their misapprehension. It was like that with the house.
The house was admired--without enthusiasm--but it was not copied. It
was felt to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it
wore its superiority in the popular view like a folly. It was in Elgin,
but not of it: it represented a different tradition; and Elgin made the
same allowance for its bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities
as was conceded to its original master’s habit of a six-o’clock dinner,
with wine.
The architectural expression of the town was on a different scale,
beginning with “frame,” rising through the semidetached, culminating
expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas and modern conveniences, and
blossoming, in extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk
portieres for interior decoration. The Murchison house gained by force
of contrast: one felt, stepping into it, under influences of less
expediency and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention;
its shabby spaces had a redundancy the pleasanter and its yellow plaster
cornices a charm the greater for the numerous close-set examples of
contemporary taste in red brick which made, surrounded by geranium beds,
so creditable an appearance in the West Ward. John Murchison in taking
possession of the house had felt in it these satisfactions, had been
definitely penetrated and soothed by them, the more perhaps because he
brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier things of life which
circumstances had not previously developed. He seized the place with a
sense of opportunity leaping sharp and conscious out of early years
in the grey “wynds” of a northern Scottish town; and its personality
sustained him, very privately but none the less effectively, through
the worry and expense of it for years. He would take his pipe and walk
silently for long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening,
for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts in flower; and
he never opened the hall door without a feeling of gratification in
its weight as it swung under his hand. In so far as he could, he
supplemented the idiosyncrasies he found. The drawing-room walls, though
mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper--lavender and gilt, a
grape-vine pattern--held a few good engravings; the library was reduced
to contain a single bookcase, but it was filled with English classics.
John Murchison had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the
discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books. He bought them
between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the
expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under
his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose
itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe. Mrs Murchison
kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband
brought home Chambers’s Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly
and definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new
winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all endurance. Mrs
Murchison was surrounded, indeed, by more of “that sort of thing”
than she could find use or excuse for; since, though books made but a
sporadic appearance, current literature, daily, weekly, and monthly,
was perpetually under her feet. The Toronto paper came as a matter of
course, as the London daily takes its morning flight into the provinces,
the local organ as simply indispensable, the Westminster as the
corollary of church membership and for Sunday reading. These were
constant, but there were also mutables--Once a Week, Good Words for
the Young, Blackwood’s, and the Cornhill they used to be; years of back
numbers Mrs Murchison had packed away in the attic, where Advena
on rainy days came into the inheritance of them, and made an early
acquaintance with fiction in Ready Money Mortiboy and Verner’s Pride,
while Lorne, flat on his stomach beside her, had glorious hours on The
Back of the North Wind. Their father considered such publications and
their successors essential, like tobacco and tea. He was also an easy
prey to the subscription agent, for works published in parts and
paid for in instalments, a custom which Mrs Murchison regarded with
abhorrence. So much so that when John put his name down for Masterpieces
of the World’s Art, which was to cost twenty dollars by the time it was
complete, he thought it advisable to let the numbers accumulate at the
store.
Whatever the place represented to their parents, it was pure joy to the
young Murchisons. It offered a margin and a mystery to life. They saw
it far larger than it was; they invested it, arguing purely by its
difference from other habitations, with a romantic past. “I guess
when the Prince of Wales came to Elgin, Mother, he stayed here,” Lorne
remarked, as a little boy. Secretly he and Advena took up boards in more
than one unused room, and rapped on more than one thick wall to find a
hollow chamber; the house revealed so much that was interesting, it was
apparent to the meanest understanding that it must hide even more.
It was never half lighted, and there was a passage in which fear
dwelt--wild were the gallopades from attic to cellar in the early
nightfall, when every young Murchison tore after every other, possessed,
like cats, by a demoniac ecstasy of the gloaming. And the garden, with
the autumn moon coming over the apple trees and the neglected asparagus
thick for ambush, and a casual untrimmed boy or two with the delicious
recommendation of being utterly without credentials, to join in the rout
and be trusted to make for the back fence without further hint at the
voice of Mrs Murchison--these were joys of the very fibre, things to
push ideas and envisage life with an attraction that made it worth while
to grow up.
And they had all achieved it--all six. They had grown up sturdily,
emerging into sobriety and decorum by much the same degrees as the old
house, under John Murchison’s improving fortunes, grew cared for and
presentable. The new roof went on, slate replacing shingles, the year
Abby put her hair up; the bathroom was contemporary with Oliver’s
leaving school; the electric light was actually turned on for the
first time in honour of Lorne’s return from Toronto, a barrister and
solicitor; several rooms had been done up for Abby’s wedding. Abby had
married, early and satisfactorily, Dr Harry Johnson, who had placidly
settled down to await the gradual succession of his father’s practice;
“Dr Harry and Dr Henry” they were called. Dr Harry lived next door to
Dr Henry, and had a good deal of the old man’s popular manner. It was
an unacknowledged partnership, which often provided two opinions for the
same price; the town prophesied well of it. That left only five at
home, but they always had Abby over in the West Ward, where Abby’s
housekeeping made an interest and Abby’s baby a point of pilgrimage.
These considerations almost consoled Mrs Murchison declaring, as she
did, that all of them might have gone but Abby, who alone knew how to be
“any comfort or any dependence” in the house; who could be left with a
day’s preserving; and I tell you that to be left by Mrs Murchison with a
day’s preserving, be it cherries or strawberries, damsons or pears, was
a mark of confidence not easy to obtain. Advena never had it; Advena,
indeed, might have married and removed no prop of the family economy.
Mrs Murchison would have been “sorry for the man”--she maintained
a candour toward and about those belonging to her that permitted no
illusions--but she would have stood cheerfully out of the way on her
own account. When you have seen your daughter reach and pass the age
of twenty-five without having learned properly to make her own bed, you
know without being told that she will never be fit for the management of
a house--don’t you? Very well then. And for ever and for ever, no matter
what there was to do, with a book in her hand--Mrs Murchison would put
an emphasis on the “book” which scarcely concealed a contempt for such
absorption. And if, at the end of your patience, you told her for any
sake to put it down and attend to matters, obeying in a kind of dream
that generally drove you to take the thing out of her hands and do it
yourself, rather than jump out of your skin watching her.
Sincerely Mrs Murchison would have been sorry for the man if he had
arrived, but he had not arrived. Advena justified her existence by
taking the university course for women at Toronto, and afterward
teaching the English branches to the junior forms in the Collegiate
Institute, which placed her arbitrarily outside the sphere of domestic
criticism. Mrs Murchison was thankful to have her there--outside--where
little more could reasonably be expected of her than that she should
be down in time for breakfast. It is so irritating to be justified
in expecting more than seems likely to come. Mrs Murchison’s ideas
circulated strictly in the orbit of equity and reason; she expected
nothing from anybody that she did not expect from herself; indeed, she
would spare others in far larger proportion. But the sense of obligation
which led her to offer herself up to the last volt of her energy made
her miserable when she considered that she was not fairly done by in
return. Pressed down and running over were the services she offered to
the general good, and it was on the ground of the merest justice that
she required from her daughters “some sort of interest” in domestic
affairs. From her eldest she got no sort of interest, and it was
like the removal of a grievance from the hearth when Advena took up
employment which ranged her definitely beyond the necessity of being
of any earthly use in the house. Advena’s occupation to some extent
absorbed her shortcomings, which was much better than having to
attribute them to her being naturally “through-other,” or naturally
clever, according to the bias of the moment. Mrs Murchison no longer
excused or complained of her daughter; but she still pitied the man.
“The boys,” of course, were too young to think of matrimony. They were
still the boys, the Murchison boys; they would be the boys at forty if
they remained under their father’s roof. In the mother country, men in
short jackets and round collars emerge from the preparatory schools; in
the daughter lands boys in tailcoats conduct serious affairs. Alec
and Oliver, in the business, were frivolous enough as to the feminine
interest. For all Dr Drummond’s expressed and widely known views upon
the subject, it was a common thing for one or both of these young men
to stray from the family pew on Sunday evenings to the services of other
communions, thereafter to walk home in the dusk under the maples with
some attractive young person, and be sedately invited to finish the
evening on her father’s verandah. Neither of them was guiltless of silk
ties knitted or handkerchiefs initialled by certain fingers; without
repeating scandal, one might say by various fingers. For while the
ultimate import of these matters was not denied in Elgin, there was
a general feeling against giving too much meaning to them, probably
originating in a reluctance among heads of families to add to their
responsibilities. These early spring indications were belittled and
laughed at; so much so that the young people them selves hardly
took them seriously, but regarded them as a form of amusement almost
conventional. Nothing would have surprised or embarrassed them more
than to learn that their predilections had an imperative corollary,
that anything should, of necessity, “come of it.” Something, of course,
occasionally did come of it; and, usually after years of “attention,” a
young man of Elgin found himself mated to a young woman, but never under
circumstances that could be called precipitate or rash. The cautious
blood and far sight of the early settlers, who had much to reckon with,
were still preponderant social characteristics of the town they cleared
the site for. Meanwhile, however, flowers were gathered, and all sorts
of evanescent idylls came and went in the relations of young men and
maidens. Alec and Oliver Murchison were already in the full tide of
them.
From this point of view they did not know what to make of Lorne. It was
not as if their brother were in any way ill calculated to attract that
interest which gave to youthful existence in Elgin almost the only
flavour that it had. Looks are looks, and Lorne had plenty of them;
taller by an inch than Alec, broader by two than Oliver, with a fine
square head and blue eyes in it, and features which conveyed purpose and
humour, lighted by a certain simplicity of soul that pleased even when
it was not understood. “Open,” people said he was, and “frank”--so he
was, frank and open, with horizons and intentions; you could see them in
his face. Perhaps it was more conscious of them than he was. Ambition,
definitely shining goals, adorn the perspectives of young men in new
countries less often than is commonly supposed. Lorne meant to be a good
lawyer, squarely proposed to himself that the country should hold no
better; and as to more selective usefulness, he hoped to do a little
stumping for the right side when Frank Jennings ran for the Ontario
House in the fall. It wouldn’t be his first electioneering: from the day
he became chairman of the Young Liberals the party had an eye on him,
and when occasion arose, winter or summer, by bobsleigh or buggy,
weatherbeaten local bosses would convey him to country schoolhouses for
miles about to keep a district sound on railway policy, or education,
or tariff reform. He came home smiling with the triumphs of these
occasions, and offered them, with the slow, good-humoured, capable drawl
that inspired such confidence in him, to his family at breakfast, who
said “Great!” or “Good for you, Lorne!” John Murchison oftenest said
nothing, but would glance significantly at his wife, frowning and
pursing his lips when she, who had most spirit of them all, would
exclaim, “You’ll be Premier yet, Lorne!” It was no part of the Murchison
policy to draw against future balances: they might believe everything,
they would express nothing; and I doubt whether Lorne himself had any
map of the country he meant to travel over in that vague future, already
defining in local approbation, and law business coming freely in with
a special eye on the junior partner. But the tract was there,
subconscious, plain in the wider glance, the alerter manner; plain even
in the grasp and stride which marked him in a crowd; plain, too, in the
preoccupation with other issues, were it only turning over a leader
in the morning’s Dominion, that carried him along indifferent to the
allurements I have described. The family had a bond of union in their
respect for Lorne, and this absence of nugatory inclinations in him
was among its elements. Even Stella who, being just fourteen, was the
natural mouthpiece of family sentiment, would declare that Lorne had
something better to do than go hanging about after girls, and for her
part she thought all the more of him for it.