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.