Mr Farquharson was to retain his seat until the early spring, for the
double purpose of maintaining his influence upon an important commission
of which he was chairman until the work should be done, and of giving
the imperial departure championed by his successor as good a chance as
possible of becoming understood in the constituency. It was understood
that the new writ would issue for a date in March; Elgin referred all
interest to that point, and prophesied for itself a lively winter.
Another event, of importance less general, was arranged for the end of
February--the arrival of Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon from Scotland.
Finlay had proposed an earlier date, but matters of business connected
with her mother’s estate would delay Miss Cameron’s departure. Her
arrival would be the decisive point of another campaign. He and Advena
faced it without misgiving, but there were moments when Finlay greatly
wished the moment past.
Their intimacy had never been conspicuous, and their determination to
make no change in it could be carried out without attracting attention.
It was very dear to them, that determination. They saw it as a test, as
an ideal. Last of all, perhaps, as an alleviation. They were both too
much encumbered with ideas to move simply, quickly, on the impulse
of passion. They looked at it through the wrong end of the glass, and
thought they put it farther away. They believed that their relation
comprised, would always comprise, the best of life. It was matter for
discussion singularly attractive; they allowed themselves upon it wide
scope in theory. They could speak of it in the heroic temper, without
sadness or bitterness; the thing was to tear away the veil and look fate
in the face. The great thing, perhaps, was to speak of it while still
they could give themselves leave; a day would arrive, they acknowledged
with averted eyes, when dumbness would be more becoming. Meanwhile, Mrs
Murchison would have found it hard to sustain her charge against them
that they talked of nothing but books and authors; the philosophy of
life, as they were intensely creating it, was more entrancing than
any book or any author. Simply and definitely, and to their own
satisfaction, they had abandoned the natural demands of their state;
they lived in its exaltation and were far from accidents. Deep in both
of them was a kind of protective nobility; I will not say it cost them
nothing, but it turned the scenes between them into comedy of the better
sort, the kind that deserves the relief of stone or bronze. Advena,
had she heard it, would have repelled Dr Drummond’s warning with
indignation. If it were so possible to keep their friendship on an
unfaltering level then, with the latitude they had, what danger could
attend them later, when the social law would support them, divide them,
protect them? Dr Drummond, suspecting all, looked grimly on, and from
November to March found no need to invite Mr Finlay to occupy the pulpit
of Knox Church.
They had come to full knowledge that night of their long walk in the
dark together; but even then, in the rush and shock and glory of
it, they had held apart; and their broken avowals had crossed with
difficulty from one to the other. The whole fabric of circumstance was
between them, to realize and to explore; later surveys, as we know,
had not reduced it. They gave it great credit as a barrier; I suppose
because it kept them out of each other’s arms. It had done that.
It was Advena, I fear, who insisted most that they should continue upon
terms of happy debt to one another, the balance always changing, the
account never closed and rendered. She no doubt felt that she might
impose the terms; she had unconsciously the sense of greater sacrifice,
and knew that she had been mistress of the situation long before he
was aware of it. He agreed with joy and with misgiving; he saw with
enthusiasm her high conception of their alliance, but sometimes
wondered, poor fellow, whether he was right in letting it cover him.
He came to the house as he had done before, as often as he could, and
reproached himself that he could not, after all, come very often.
That they should discuss their relation as candidly as they sustained it
was perhaps a little peculiar to them, so I have laid stress on it; but
it was not by any means their sole preoccupation. They talked like
tried friends of their every-day affairs. Indeed, after the trouble and
intoxication of their great understanding had spent itself, it was the
small practical interests of life that seemed to hold them most. One
might think that Nature, having made them her invitation upon the higher
plane, abandoned them in the very scorn of her success to the warm human
commonplaces that do her work well enough with the common type. Mrs
Murchison would have thought better of them if she had chanced again to
overhear.
“I wouldn’t advise you to have it lined with fur,” Advena was saying.
The winter had sharply announced itself, and Finlay, to her reproach
about his light overcoat, had declared his intention of ordering a
buffalo-skin the following day. “And the buffaloes are all gone, you
know--thirty years ago,” she laughed. “You really are not modern in
practical matters. Does it ever surprise you that you get no pemmican
for dinner, and hardly ever meet an Indian in his feathers?”
He looked at her with delight in his sombre eyes. It was a new
discovery, her capacity for happily chaffing him, only revealed since
she had come out of her bonds to love; it was hard to say which of them
took the greater pleasure in it.
“What is the use of living in Canada if you can’t have fur on your
clothes?” he demanded.
“You may have a little--astrakhan, I would--on the collar and cuffs,”
she said. “A fur lining is too hot if there happens to be a thaw, and
then you would leave it off and take cold. You have all the look,” she
added, with a gravely considering glance at him, “of a person who ought
to take care of his chest.”
He withdrew his eyes hurriedly, and fixed them instead on his pipe. He
always brought it with him, by her order, and Advena usually sewed. He
thought as he watched her that it made the silences enjoyable.
“And expensive, I dare say, too,” he said.
“Yes, more or less. Alec paid fifty dollars for his, and never liked
it.”
“Fifty dollars--ten pounds! No vair for me!” he declared. “By the way,
Mrs Firmin is threatening to turn me out of house and home. A married
daughter is coming to live with her, and she wants my rooms.”
“When does she come--the married daughter?”
“Oh, not till the early spring! There’s no immediate despair,” said
Finlay, “but it is dislocating. My books and I had just succeeded in
making room for one another.”
“But you will have to move, in any case, in the early spring.”
“I suppose I will. I had--I might have remembered that.”
“Have you found a house yet?” Advena asked him.
“No.”
“Have you been looking?” It was a gentle, sensible reminder.
“I’m afraid I haven’t.” He moved in his chair as if in physical
discomfort. “Do you think I ought--so soon? There are always plenty
of--houses, aren’t there?”
“Not plenty of desirable ones. Do you think you must live in East
Elgin?”
“It would be rather more convenient.”
“Because there are two semidetached in River Street, just finished, that
look very pretty and roomy. I thought when I saw them that one of them
might be what you would like.”
“Thank you,” he said, and tried not to say it curtly.
“They belong to White, the grocer. River Street isn’t East Elgin, but it
is that way, and it would be a great deal pleasanter for--for her.”
“I must consider that, of course. You haven’t been in them? I should
hope for a bright sitting-room, and a very private study.”
If Advena was aware of any unconscious implication, the pair of eyes she
turned upon him showed no trace of satisfaction in it.
“No, I haven’t. But if I could be of any use I should be very glad to go
over them with you, and--”
She stopped involuntarily, checked by the embarrassment in his face,
though she had to wait for his words to explain it.
“I should be most grateful. But--but might it not be misunderstood?”
She bent her head over her work, and one of those instants passed
between them which he had learned to dread. They were so completely
the human pair as they sat together, withdrawn in comfort and shelter,
absorbed in homely matters and in each other; it was easy to forget that
they were only a picture, a sham, and that the reality lay further on,
in the early spring. It must have been hard for him to hear without
resentment that she was ready to help him to make a home for that
reality. He was fast growing instructed in women, although by a
post-graduate course.
Advena looked up. “Possibly,” she said, calmly, and their agitation
lay still between them. He was silently angry; the thing that stirred
without their leave had been sweet.
“No,” said Advena, “I can’t go, I suppose. I’m sorry. I should have
liked so much to be of use.” She looked up at him appealingly, and
sudden tears came and stood in her eyes, and would perhaps have undone
his hurt but that he was staring into the fire.
“How can you be of use,” he said, almost irritably, “in such ways as
those? They are not important, and I am not sure that for us they are
legitimate. If you were about to be--married”--he seemed to plunge at
the word--“I should not wish either to hasten you or to house you. I
should turn my back on it all. You should have nothing from me,” he went
on, with a forced smile, “but my blessing, delivered over my shoulder.”
“I am sure they are not important,” she said humbly--privately all
unwilling to give up her martyrdom, “but surely they are legitimate. I
would like to help you in every little way I can. Don’t you like me in
your life? You have said that I may stay.”
“I believe you think that by taking strong measures one can exorcise
things,” he said. “That if we could only write out this history of ours
in our hearts’ blood it would somehow vanish.”
“No,” she said, “but I should like to do it all the same.”
“You must bear with me if I refuse the heroic in little. It is even
harder than the other.” He broke off, leaning back and looking at
her from under his shading hand as if that might protect him from too
complete a vision. The firelight was warm on her cheek and hair, her
needle once again completed the dear delusion: she sat there, his wife.
This was an aspect he forbade, but it would return; here it was again.
“It is good to have you in my life,” he said. “It is also good to
recognize one’s possibilities.”
“How can you definitely lose me?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t know. Now that I have found you it is as if you and I had been
rocked together on the tide of that inconceivable ocean that casts us
half-awake upon life,” he said dreamily. “It isn’t friendship of ideas,
it’s a friendship of spirit. Indeed, I hope and pray never wholly to
lose that.”
“You never will,” she told him. “How many worlds one lives in as the day
goes by with the different people one cares for--one beyond the other,
concentric, ringing from the heart! Yours comprises all the others; it
lies the farthest out--and alas! at present, the closest in,” she added
irresistibly to the asking of his eyes.
“But,” she hurried on, taking high ground to remedy her indiscretion,
“I look forward to the time when this--other feeling of ours will become
just an idea, as it is now just an emotion, at which we should try to
smile. It is the attitude of the gods.”
“And therefore not becoming to men. Why should we, not being gods.
borrow their attitude?” said Finlay.
“I could never kill it,” she put her work in her lap to say, “by any
sudden act of violence. It would seem a kind of suicide. While it rules
it is like one’s life--absolute. But to isolate it--to place it beyond
the currents from the heart--to look at it, and realize it, and conquer
it for what it is--I don’t think it need take so very long. And then our
friendship will be beautiful without reproach.”
“I sometimes fear there may not be time enough in life,” he said. “And
if I find that I must simply go--to British Columbia, I think--those
mining missions would give a man his chance against himself. There is
splendid work to be done there, of a rough-and-ready kind that would
make it puerile to spend time in self-questioning.”
She smiled as if at a violent boy. “We can do it. We can do it here,”
she said. “May I quote another religion to you? ‘From purification there
arises in the Yogi a thorough discernment of the cause and nature of the
body, whereupon he loses that regard which others have for the bodily
form.’ Then, if he loves, he loves in spirit and in truth. I look
forward to the time,” she went on calmly, “when the best that I can give
you or you can give me will ride upon a glance.”
“I used to feel more drawn to the ascetic achievement and its rewards,”
he remarked thoughtfully, “than I do now.”
“If I were not a Presbyterian in Canada,” she told him, “I would be a
Buddhist in Burma. But I have inherited the Shorter Catechism; I must
remain without the Law.”
Finlay smiled. “They are the simple,” he said. “Our Law makes wise the
simple.”
Advena looked for a moment into the fire. She was listening, with
admiration, to her heart; she would not be led to consider esoteric
contrasts of East and West.
“Isn’t there something that appeals to you,” she said, “in the thought
of just leaving it, all unsaid and all undone, a dear and tender
projection upon the future that faded--a lovely thing we turned away
from, until one day it was no longer there?”
“Charming,” he said, averting his eyes so that she should not see the
hunger in them. “Charming--literature!”
She smiled and sighed, and he wrenched his mind to the consideration
of the Buddhism of Browning. She followed him obediently, but the lines
they wanted did not come easily; they were compelled to search and
verify. Something lately seemed lost to them of that kind of glad
activity; he was more aware of it than she, since he was less occupied
in the aesthetic ecstasy of self-torture. In the old time before the sun
rose they had been so conscious of realms of idea lying just beyond
the achievement of thought, approachable, visible by phrases, brokenly,
realms which they could see closer when they essayed together. He
constantly struggled to reach those enchanted areas again, but they
seemed to have gone down behind the horizon; and the only inspiration
that carried them far drew its impetus from the poetry of their plight.
They looked for verses to prove that Browning’s imagination carried him
bravely through lives and lives to come, and found them to speculate
whether in such chances they might hope to meet again.
And the talk came back to his difficulties with his Board of Management,
and to her choice of a frame for the etching he had given her, by his
friend the Glasgow impressionist, and to their opinion of a common
acquaintance, and to Lorne and his prospects. He told her how little
she resembled her brother, and where they diverged, and how; and she
listened with submission and delight, enchanted to feel his hand upon
her intimate nature. She lingered in the hall while he got into his
overcoat, and saw that a glove was the worse for wear. “Would it be the
heroic-in-little,” she begged, “to let me mend that?”
As he went out alone into the winter streets he too drew upon a pagan
for his admonition. “‘What then art thou doing here, O imagination?’” he
groaned in his private heart. “‘Go away, I entreat thee by the gods, for
I want thee not. But thou art come again according to thy old fashion. I
am not angry with thee, only go away!’”