Peter Macfarlane had carried the big Bible up the pulpit steps of Knox
Church, and arranged the glass of water and the notices to be given out
beside it, twice every Sunday for twenty years. He was a small spare
man, with thin grey hair that fell back from the narrow dome of his
forehead to his coat collar, decent and severe. He ascended the pulpit
exactly three minutes before the minister did; and the dignity with
which he put one foot before the other made his appearance a ceremonious
feature of the service and a thing quoted. “I was there before Peter”
was a triumphant evidence of punctuality. Dr Drummond would have liked
to make it a test. It seemed to him no great thing to expect the people
of Knox Church to be there before Peter.
Macfarlane was also in attendance in the vestry to help the minister off
with his gown and hang it up. Dr Drummond’s gown needed neither helping
nor hanging; the Doctor was deftness and neatness and impatience itself,
and would have it on the hook with his own hands, and never a fold
crooked. After Mr Finlay, on the contrary, Peter would have to pick up
and smooth out--ten to one the garment would be flung on a chair. Still,
he was invariably standing by to see it flung, and to hand Mr Finlay his
hat and stick. He was surprised and put about to find himself one Sunday
evening too late for this attendance. The vestry was empty, the gown
was on the floor. Peter gathered it up with as perturbed an air as if Mr
Finlay had omitted a point of church observance. “I doubt they get into
slack ways in these missions,” said Peter. He had been unable, with Dr
Drummond, to see the necessity for such extensions.
Meanwhile Hugh Finlay, in secular attire, had left the church by the
vestry door, and was rapidly overtaking groups of his hearers as they
walked homeward. He was unusually aware of his change of dress because
of a letter in the inside pocket of his coat. The letter, in that
intimate place, spread a region of consciousness round it which hastened
his blood and his step. There was purpose in his whole bearing; Advena
Murchison, looking back at some suggestion of Lorne’s, caught it, and
lost for a moment the meaning of what she said. When he overtook them,
with plain intention, she walked beside the two men, withdrawn and
silent, like a child. It was unexpected and overwhelming, his joining
them after the service, accompanying them, as it were, in the flesh
after having led them so far in the spirit; he had never done it before.
She felt her heart confronted with a new, an immediate issue, and
suddenly afraid. It shrank from the charge for which it longed, and
would have fled; yet, paralysed with delight, it kept time with her
sauntering feet.
They talked of the sermon, which had been strongly tinged with the issue
of the day. Dreamer as he was by temperament, Finlay held to the wisdom
of informing great public questions with the religious idea, vigorously
disclaimed that it was anywhere inadmissible.
“You’ll have to settle with the Doctor, Mr Finlay,” Lorne warned him
gaily, “if you talk politics in Knox Church. He thinks he never does.”
“Do you think,” said Finlay, “that he would object to--to one’s going as
far afield as I did tonight?”
“He oughtn’t to,” said Lorne. “You should have heard him when old Sir
John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to
the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation
couldn’t say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits.”
Finlay smiled gravely. “Political convictions are a man’s birthright,”
he said. “Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them. But
of course there are limits beyond which pulpit influence should not go,
and I am sure Dr Drummond has the clearest perception of them. He seems
to have been a wonderful fellow, Macdonald, a man with extraordinary
power of imaginative enterprise. I wonder whether he would have seen his
way to linking up the Empire as he linked up your Provinces here?”
“He’d have hated uncommonly to be in opposition, but I don’t see how
he could have helped it,” Lorne said. “He was the godfather of Canadian
manufacturers, you know--the Tories have always been the industrial
party. He couldn’t have gone for letting English stuff in free, or
cheap; and yet he was genuinely loyal and attached to England. He would
discriminate against Manchester with tears in his eyes! Imperialist in
his time spelled Conservative, now it spells Liberal. The Conservatives
have always talked the loudest about the British bond, but when it
lately came to doing we’re on record on the right side, and they’re on
record on the wrong. But it must make the old man’s ghost sick to see--”
“To see his court suit stolen,” Advena finished for him. “As Disraeli
said--wasn’t it Disraeli?” She heard, and hated the note of constraint
in her voice. “Am I reduced,” she thought, indignantly, “to falsetto?”
and chose, since she must choose, the betrayal of silence.
“It did one good to hear the question discussed on the higher level,”
said Lorne. “You would think, to read the papers, that all its merits
could be put into dollars and cents.”
“I’ve noticed some of them in terms of sentiment--affection for the
mother country--”
“Yes, that’s lugged in. But it doesn’t cover the moral aspect,” Lorne
returned. “It’s too easy and obvious, as well; it gives the enemy cause
to offend.”
“Well, there’s a tremendous moral aspect,” Finlay said, “tremendous
moral potentialities hidden in the issue. England has more to lose than
she dreams.”
“That’s just where I felt, as a practical politician, a little restless
while you were preaching,” said Lorne, laughing. “You seemed to think
the advantage of imperialism was all with England. You mustn’t press
that view on us, you know. We shall get harder to bargain with. Besides,
from the point of your sermon, it’s all the other way.”
“Oh, I don’t agree! The younger nations can work out their own salvation
unaided; but can England alone? Isn’t she too heavily weighted?”
“Oh, materially, very likely! But morally, no,” said Lorne, stoutly.
“There, if you like, she has accumulations that won’t depreciate. Money
isn’t the only capital the colonies offer investment for.”
“I’m afraid I see it in the shadow of the degeneration of age and
poverty,” said Finlay, smiling--“or age and wealth, if you prefer it.”
“And we in the disadvantage of youth and easy success,” Lorne retorted.
“We’re all very well, but we’re not the men our fathers were: we need a
lot of licking into shape. Look at that disgraceful business of ours in
the Ontario legislature the other day, and look at that fellow of
yours walking out of office at Westminster last session because of a
disastrous business connection which he was morally as clear of as
you or I! I tell you we’ve got to hang on to the things that make us
ashamed; and I guess we’ve got sense enough to know it. But this is my
corner. I am going to look in at the Milburns’, Advena. Good night, Mr
Finlay.”
Advena, walking on with Finlay, became suddenly aware that he had not
once addressed her. She had the quick impression that Lorne left him
bereft of a refuge; his plight heartened her.
“If the politicians on both sides were only as mutually appreciative,”
she said, “the Empire would soon be knit.”
For a moment he did not answer. “I am afraid the economic situation is
not quite analogous,” he said, stiffly and absently, when the moment had
passed.
“Why does your brother always call me ‘Mr’ Finlay?” he demanded
presently. “It isn’t friendly.”
The note of irritation in his voice puzzled her. “I think the form is
commoner with us,” she said, “even among men who know each other fairly
well.” Her secret glance flashed over the gulf that nevertheless divided
Finlay and her brother, that would always divide them. She saw it with
something like pain, which struggled through her pride in both. “And
then, you know--your calling--”
“I suppose it is that,” he replied, ill content.
“I’ve noticed Dr Drummond’s way,” she told him, with rising spirits.
“It’s delightful. He drops the ‘Mr’ with fellow-ministers of his own
denomination only--never with Wesleyans or Baptists, for a moment. He
always comes back very genial from the General Assembly, and full of
stories. ‘I said to Grant,’ or ‘Macdonald said to me’--and he always
calls you ‘Finlay,’” she added shyly. “By the way, I suppose you know
he’s to be the new Moderator?”
“Is he, indeed? Yes--yes, of course, I knew! We couldn’t have a better.”
They walked on through the early autumn night. It was just not raining.
The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which
lay thick under their feet. Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut
husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along. She had picked
up half a dozen when he spoke again. “I want to tell you--I have to tell
you--something--about myself, Miss Murchison.”
“I should like,” said Advena steadily, “to hear.”
“It is a matter that has, I am ashamed to confess, curiously gone out
of my mind of late--I should say until lately. There was little until
lately--I am so poor a letter writer--to remind me of it. I am engaged
to be married!”
“But how interesting!” exclaimed Advena.
He looked at her taken aback. His own mood was heavy; it failed to
answer this lightness from her. It is hard to know what he expected,
what his unconscious blood expected for him; but it was not this. If
he had little wisdom about the hearts of women, he had less about their
behaviour. She said nothing more, but inclined her head in an angle of
deference and expectation toward what he should further communicate.
“I don’t know that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland,”
he went on. “It has always seemed to me so remote and--disconnected with
everything here. I could not suppose it would interest anyone. I was
cared for and educated by my father’s only sister, a good woman. It was
as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed
in work. I don’t know that I can make you understand. She was identified
with all the rest--I left it to her. Shortly before I sailed for Canada
she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and--welfare, and
with--a niece of her husband’s who was staying with us at the time,
a person suitable in every way. Apart from my aunt, I do not
know--However, I owed everything to her, and I--took her advice in the
matter. I left it to her. She is a managing woman; but she can nearly
always prove herself right. Her mind ran a great deal, a little too
much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in
emigrating a man might do well to companion himself.”
“That was prudent of her,” said Advena.
He turned a look upon her. “You are not--making a mock of it?” he said.
“I am not making a mock of it.”
“My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie’s home has been broken
up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is
willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to
write.”
He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed
the turning to the Murchisons’, walking on with the single consciousness
of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that
had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not
know.
“You are to write,” she said. She sought in vain for more words; he
also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for
phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked
with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing
a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the
light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.
“It seems so extraordinarily--far away,” said Hugh Finlay, of Bross,
Dumfries, at length.
“But it will come near,” Advena replied.
“I don’t think it ever can.”
She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.
“They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and
the man whom I remember to have been me--there is a gulf fixed--”
“It is only the Atlantic,” Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in
spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt
she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile
she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to
form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.
He shook his head. “It is not marked in any geography,” he said, and
gave her a troubled smile. “How can I make it clear to you? I have come
here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before.
I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty
and charm of mere vitality--you have always been so alive. One finds a
physical freedom in which one’s very soul seems to expand; one hears the
happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing
of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to
respond--”
The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm,
healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he
recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the
general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her
life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his,
could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.
It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was
grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should
at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to
such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow
the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short
of man’s dignity, of man’s estate, for his own sake.
“It is a curious history,” she said. “You are right in thinking I should
not find it quite easy to understand. We make those--arrangements--so
much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important
than they are.”
“But they are of the highest importance.” He stopped short, confounded.
“I shall try to consecrate my marriage,” he said presently, more to
himself than to Advena.
Her thought told him bitterly: “I am afraid it is the only thing you can
do with it,” but something else came to her lips.
“I have not congratulated you. I am not sure,” she went on, with
astonishing candour, “whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all
my heart. Are you happy now?”
He turned his great dark eyes on her. “I am as happy, I dare say, as I
have any need to be.”
“But you are happier since your letter came?”
“No,” he said. The simple word fell on her heart, and she forbore.
They went on again in silence until they arrived at a place from which
they saw the gleam of the river and the line of the hills beyond. Advena
stopped.
“We came here once before together--in the spring. Do you remember?” she
asked.
“I remember very well.” She had turned, and he with her. They stood
together with darkness about them, through which they could just see
each other’s faces.
“It was spring then, and I went back alone. You are still living up that
street? Good night, then, please. I wish again--to go back--alone.”
He looked at her for an instant in dumb bewilderment, though her words
were simple enough. Then as she made a step away from him he caught her
hand.
“Advena,” he faltered, “what has happened to us? This time I cannot let
you.”