Miss Milburn pressed her contention that the suspicion of his desire
would be bad for her lover’s political prospects till she made him feel
his honest passion almost a form of treachery to his party. She also
hinted that, for the time being, it did not make particularly for her
own comfort in the family circle, Mr Milburn having grown by this time
quite bitter. She herself drew the excitement of intrigue from the
situation, which she hid behind her pretty, pale, decorous features, and
never betrayed by the least of her graceful gestures. She told herself
that she had never been so right about anything as about that affair of
the ring--imagine, for an instant, if she had been wearing it now! She
would have banished Lorne altogether if she could. As he insisted on
an occasional meeting, she clothed it in mystery, appointing it for an
evening when her mother and aunt were out, and answering his ring at the
door herself. To her family she remarked with detachment that you saw
hardly anything of Lorne Murchison now, he was so taken up with his
old election; and to Hesketh she confided her fear that politics did
interfere with friendship, whatever he might say. He said a good deal,
he cited lofty examples; but the only agreement he could get from her
was the hope that the estrangement wouldn’t be permanent.
“But you are going to say something, Lorne,” she insisted, talking of
the Jordanville meeting.
“Not much,” he told her. “It’s the safest district we’ve got, and they
adore old Farquharson. He’ll do most of the talking--they wouldn’t
thank me for taking up the time. Farquharson is going to tell them I’m a
first-class man, and they couldn’t do better, and I’ve practically only
to show my face and tell them I think so too.”
“But Mr Hesketh will speak?”
“Yes; we thought it would be a good chance of testing him. He may
interest them, and he can’t do much harm, anyhow.”
“Lorne, I should simply love to go. It’s your first meeting.”
“I’ll take you.”
“Mr Murchison, HAVE you taken leave of your senses? Really, you are--”
“All right, I’ll send you. Farquharson and I are going out to the
Crow place to supper, but Hesketh is driving straight there. He’ll be
delighted to bring you--who wouldn’t?”
“I shouldn’t be allowed to go with him alone,” said Dora, thoughtfully.
“Well, no. I don’t know that I’d approve of that myself,” laughed the
confident young man. “Hesketh is driving Mrs Farquharson, and the cutter
will easily hold three. Isn’t it lucky there’s sleighing?”
“Mother couldn’t object to that,” said Dora. “Lorne, I always said you
were the dearest fellow! I’ll wear a thick veil, and not a soul will
know me.”
“Not a soul would in any case,” said Lorne. “It’ll be a Jordanville
crowd, you know--nobody from Elgin.”
“We don’t visit much in Jordanville, certainly. Well, Mother mayn’t
object. She has a great idea of Mrs Farquharson, because she
has attended eleven Drawing-Rooms at Ottawa, and one of them was
given--held, I should say--by the Princess Louise.”
“I won’t promise you eleven,” said Lorne, “but there seems to be a
pretty fair chance of one or two.”
At this she had a tale for him which charmed his ears. “I didn’t know
where to look,” she said. “Aunt Emmie, you know, has a very bad trick
of coming into my room without knocking. Well, in she walked last night,
and found me before the glass PRACTISING MY CURTSEY! I could have killed
her. Pretended she thought I was out.”
“Dora, would you like ME to promise something?” he asked, with a
mischievous look.
“Of course, I would. I don’t care how much YOU promise. What?”
But already he repented of his daring, and sat beside her suddenly
conscious and abashed. Nor could any teasing prevail to draw from him
what had been on his audacious lips to say.
Social precedents are easily established in the country. The accident
that sent the first Liberal canvasser for Jordanville votes to the Crow
place for his supper would be hard to discover now; the fact remains
that he has been going there ever since. It made a greater occasion than
Mrs Crow would ever have dreamed of acknowledging. She saw to it that
they had a good meal of victuals, and affected indifference to the
rest; they must say their say, she supposed. If the occasion had one
satisfaction which she came nearer to confessing than another, it was
that the two or three substantial neighbours who usually came to meet
the politicians left their wives at home, and that she herself, to avoid
giving any offence on this score, never sat down with the men. Quite
enough to do it was, she would explain later, for her and the hired girl
to wait on them and to clear up after them. She and Bella had their
bite afterward when the men had hitched up, and when they could exchange
comments of proud congratulation upon the inroads on the johnny-cake or
the pies. So there was no ill feeling, and Mrs Crow, having vindicated
her dignity by shaking hands with the guests of the evening in the
parlour, solaced it further by maintaining the masculine state of the
occasion, in spite of protests or entreaties. To sit down opposite Mr
Crow would have made it ordinary “company”; she passed the plates and
turned it into a function.
She was waiting for them on the parlour sofa when Crow brought them in
out of the nipping early dark of December, Elmore staying behind in the
yard with the horses. She sat on the sofa in her best black dress with
the bead trimming on the neck and sleeves, a good deal pushed up
and wrinkled across the bosom, which had done all that would ever be
required of it when it gave Elmore and Abe their start in life. Her wiry
hands were crossed in her lap in the moment of waiting: you could tell
by the look of them that they were not often crossed there. They were
strenuous hands; the whole worn figure was strenuous, and the narrow set
mouth, and the eyes which had looked after so many matters for so long,
and even the way the hair was drawn back into a knot in a fashion that
would have given a phrenologist his opportunity. It was a different Mrs
Crow from the one that sat in the midst of her poultry and garden-stuff
in the Elgin market square; but it was even more the same Mrs Crow, the
sum of a certain measure of opportunity and service, an imperial figure
in her bead trimming, if the truth were known.
The room was heated to express the geniality that was harder to put in
words. The window was shut; there was a smell of varnish and whatever
was inside the “suite” of which Mrs Crow occupied the sofa. Enlarged
photographs--very much enlarged--of Mr and Mrs Crow hung upon the walls,
and one other of a young girl done in that process which tells you at
once that she was an only daughter and that she is dead. There had been
other bereavements; they were written upon the silver coffin-plates
which, framed and glazed, also contributed to the decoration of the
room; but you would have had to look close, and you might feel a
delicacy.
Mrs Crow made her greetings with precision, and sat down again upon the
sofa for a few minutes’ conversation.
“I’m telling them,” said her husband, “that the sleighin’s just held
out for them. If it ‘ud been tomorrow they’d have had to come on wheels.
Pretty soft travellin’ as it was, some places, I guess.”
“Snow’s come early this year,” said Mrs Crow. “It was an open fall,
too.”
“It has certainly,” Mr Farquharson backed her up. “About as early as I
remember it. I don’t know how much you got out here; we had a good foot
in Elgin.”
“‘Bout the same, ‘bout the same,” Mr Crow deliberated, “but it’s been
layin’ light all along over Clayfield way--ain’t had a pair of runners
out, them folks.”
“Makes a more cheerful winter, Mrs Crow, don’t you think, when it comes
early?” remarked Lorne. “Or would you rather not get it till after
Christmas?”
“I don’t know as it matters much, out here in the country. We don’t get
a great many folks passin’, best of times. An’ it’s more of a job to
take care of the stock.”
“That’s so,” Mr Crow told them. “Chores come heavier when there’s snow
on the ground, a great sight, especially if there’s drifts.”
And for an instant, with his knotted hands hanging between his knees
he pondered this unvarying aspect of his yearly experience. They all
pondered it, sympathetic.
“Well, now, Mr Farquharson,” Mrs Crow turned to him. “An’ how reely
BE ye? We’ve heard better, an’ worse, an’ middlin’--there’s ben such
contradictory reports.”
“Oh, very well, Mrs Crow. Never better. I’m going to give a lot more
trouble yet. I can’t do it in politics, that’s the worst of it. But
here’s the man that’s going to do it for me. Here’s the man!”
The Crows looked at the pretendant, as in duty bound, but not any longer
than they could help.
“Why, I guess you were at school with Elmore?” said Crow, as if the idea
had just struck him.
“He may be right peart, for all that,” said Elmore’s mother, and Elmore,
himself, entering with two leading Liberals of Jordanville, effected a
diversion, under cover of which Mrs Crow escaped, to superintend, with
Bella, the last touches to the supper in the kitchen.
Politics in and about Jordanville were accepted as a purely masculine
interest. If you had asked Mrs Crow to take a hand in them she would
have thanked you with sarcasm, and said she thought she had about enough
to do as it was. The school-house, on the night of such a meeting as
this, was recognized to be no place for ladies. It was a man’s affair,
left to the men, and the appearance there of the other sex would
have been greeted with remark and levity. Elgin, as we know, was more
sophisticated in every way, plenty of ladies attended political meetings
in the Drill Shed, where seats as likely as not would be reserved for
them; plenty of handkerchiefs waved there for the encouragement of the
hero of the evening. They did not kiss him; British phlegm, so far, had
stayed that demonstration at the southern border.
The ladies of Elgin, however, drew the line somewhere, drew it at
country meetings. Mrs Farquharson went with her husband because, since
his state of health had handed him over to her more than ever, she saw
it a part of her wifely duty. His retirement had been decided upon for
the spring, but she would be on hand to retire him at any earlier moment
should the necessity arise. “We’ll be the only female creatures there,
my dear,” she had said to Dora on the way out, and Hesketh had praised
them both for public spirit. He didn’t know, he said, how anybody would
get elected in England without the ladies, especially in the villages,
where the people were obliged to listen respectfully.
“I wonder you can afford to throw away all the influence you get in
the rural districts with soup and blankets,” he said; “but this is an
extravagant country in many ways.” Dora kept silence, not being sure of
the social prestige bound up with the distribution of soup and blankets,
but Mrs Farquharson set him sharply right.
“I guess we’d rather do without our influence if it came to that,” she
said.
Hesketh listened with deference to her account of the rural district
which had as yet produced no Ladies Bountiful, made mental notes
of several points, and placed her privately as a woman of more than
ordinary intelligence. I have always claimed for Hesketh an open mind;
he was filling it now, to its capacity, with care and satisfaction.
The schoolroom was full and waiting when they arrived. Jordanville had
been well billed, and the posters held, in addition to the conspicuous
names of Farquharson and Murchison, that of Mr Alfred Hesketh (of
London, England). There was a “send-off” to give to the retiring member,
there was a critical inspection to make of the new candidate, and
there was Mr Alfred Hesketh, of London, England, and whatever he
might signify. They were big, quiet, expectant fellows, with less
sophistication and polemic than their American counterparts, less stolid
aggressiveness than their parallels in England, if they have parallels
there. They stood, indeed, for the development between the two; they
came of the new country but not of the new light; they were democrats
who had never thrown off the monarch--what harm did he do there
overseas? They had the air of being prosperous, but not prosperous
enough for theories and doctrines. The Liberal vote of South Fox had
yet to be split by Socialism or Labour. Life was a decent rough business
that required all their attention; there was time enough for sleep
but not much for speculation. They sat leaning forward with their
hats dropped between their knees, more with the air of big schoolboys
expecting an entertainment than responsible electors come together to
approve their party’s choice. They had the uncomplaining bucolic look,
but they wore it with a difference; the difference, by this time, was
enough to mark them of another nation. Most of them had driven to the
meeting; it was not an adjournment from the public house. Nor did the
air hold any hint of beer. Where it had an alcoholic drift the flavour
was of whisky; but the stimulant of the occasion had been tea or cider,
and the room was full of patient good will.
The preliminaries were gone through with promptness; the Chair had
supped with the speakers, and Mr Crow had given him a friendly hint that
the boys wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of trimmings from HIM.
Stamping and clapping from the back benches greeted Mr Farquharson.
It diminished, grew more subdued, as it reached the front. The young
fellows were mostly at the back, and the power of demonstration had
somehow ebbed in the old ones. The retiring member addressed his
constituents for half an hour. He was standing before them as their
representative for the last time, and it was natural to look back and
note the milestones behind, the changes for the better with which he
could fairly claim association. They were matters of Federal business
chiefly, beyond the immediate horizon of Jordanville, but Farquharson
made them a personal interest for that hour at all events, and there
were one or two points of educational policy which he could illustrate
by their own schoolhouse. He approached them, as he had always done on
the level of mutual friendly interest, and in the hope of doing mutual
friendly business. “You know and I know,” he said more than once; they
and he knew a number of things together.
He was afraid, he said, that if the doctors hadn’t chased him out of
politics, he never would have gone. Now, however, that they gave him no
choice, he was glad to think that though times had been pretty good for
the farmers of South Fox all through the eleven years of his appearance
in the political arena, he was leaving it at a moment when they promised
to be better still. Already, he was sure, they were familiar with the
main heads of that attractive prospect and, agreeable as the subject,
great as the policy was to him, he would leave it to be further unfolded
by the gentleman whom they all hoped to enlist in the cause, as his
successor for this constituency, Mr Lorne Murchison, and by his friend
from the old country, Mr Alfred Hesketh. He, Farquharson, would not take
the words out of the mouths of these gentlemen, much as he envied them
the opportunity of uttering them. The French Academy, he told them, that
illustrious body of literary and scientific men, had a custom, on the
death of a member and the selection of his successor, of appointing one
of their number to eulogize the newcomer. The person upon whom the task
would most appropriately fall, did circumstances permit, would be the
departing academician. In this case, he was happy to say, circumstances
did permit--his political funeral was still far enough off to enable him
to express his profound confidence in and his hearty admiration of the
young and vigorous political heir whom the Liberals of South Fox had
selected to stand in his shoes. Mr Farquharson proceeded to give his
grounds for this confidence and admiration, reminding the Jordanville
electors that they had met Mr Murchison as a Liberal standard-bearer in
the last general election, when he, Farquharson, had to acknowledge
very valuable services on Mr Murchison’s part. The retiring member then
thanked his audience for the kind attention and support they had given
him for so many years, made a final cheerful joke about a Pagan divinity
known as Anno Domini, and took his seat.
They applauded him, and it was plain that they regretted him, the tried
friend, the man there was never any doubt about, whose convictions they
had repeated, and whose speeches in Parliament they had read with a kind
of proprietorship for so long. The Chair had to wait, before introducing
Mr Alfred Hesketh, until the backbenchers had got through with a double
rendering of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which bolder spirits sent
lustily forth from the anteroom where the little girls kept their hats
and comforters, interspersed with whoops. Hesketh, it had been arranged,
should speak next, and Lorne last.
Mr Hesketh left his wooden chair with smiling ease, the ease which is
intended to level distinctions and put everybody concerned on the
best of terms. He said that though he was no stranger to the work
of political campaigns, this was the first time that he had had the
privilege of addressing a colonial audience. “I consider,” said he
handsomely, “that it is a privilege.” He clasped his hands behind his
back and threw out his chest.
“Opinions have differed in England as to the value of the colonies, and
the consequence of colonials. I say here with pride that I have
ever been among those who insist that the value is very high and the
consequence very great. The fault is common to humanity, but we are, I
fear, in England, too prone to be led away by appearances, and to forget
that under a rough unpolished exterior may beat virtues which are the
brightest ornaments of civilization, that in the virgin fields of the
possessions which the good swords of our ancestors wrung for us from
the Algonquins and the--and the other savages--may be hidden the most
glorious period of the British race.”
Mr Hesketh paused and coughed. His audience neglected the opportunity
for applause, but he had their undivided attention. They were looking at
him and listening to him, these Canadian farmers, with curious interest
in his attitude, his appearance, his inflection, his whole personality
as it offered itself to them--it was a thing new and strange. Far out
in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all
the summer, Hesketh’s would have been a voice from home; but here, in
long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other
things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising
with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.
“If we in England,” Hesketh proceeded, “required a lesson--as perhaps we
did--in the importance of the colonies, we had it; need I remind you? in
the course of the late protracted campaign in South Africa. Then did
the mother country indeed prove the loyalty and devotion of her colonial
sons. Then were envious nations compelled to see the spectacle of
Canadians and Australians rallying about the common flag, eager to
attest their affection for it with their life-blood, and to demonstrate
that they, too, were worthy to add deeds to British traditions and
victories to the British cause.”
Still no mark of appreciation. Hesketh began to think them an unhandsome
lot. He stood bravely, however, by the note he had sounded. He dilated
on the pleasure and satisfaction it had been to the people of England
to receive this mark of attachment from far-away dominions and
dependencies, on the cementing of the bonds of brotherhood by the blood
of the fallen, on the impossibility that the mother country should ever
forget such voluntary sacrifices for her sake, when, unexpectedly and
irrelevantly, from the direction of the cloakroom, came the expressive
comment “Yah!”
Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh
sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation--
What should they know of England
Who only England know?
which he could not, perhaps, have been expected to forbear. His
audience, however, were plainly not in the vein for compliment. The same
voice from the anteroom inquired ironically, “That so?” and the speaker
felt advised to turn to more immediate considerations.
He said he had had the great pleasure on his arrival in this country
to find a political party, the party in power, their Canadian Liberal
party, taking initiative in a cause which he was sure they all had
at heart--the strengthening of the bonds between the colonies and the
mother country. He congratulated the Liberal party warmly upon having
shown themselves capable of this great function--a point at which he was
again interrupted; and he recapitulated some of the familiar arguments
about the desirability of closer union from the point of view of the
army, of the Admiralty, and from one which would come home, he knew, to
all of them, the necessity of a dependable food supply for the mother
country in time of war. Here he quoted a noble lord. He said that he
believed no definite proposals had been made, and he did not understand
how any definite proposals could be made; for his part, if the new
arrangement was to be in the nature of a bargain, he would prefer to
have nothing to do with it.
“England,” he said, loftily, “has no wish to buy the loyalty of her
colonies, nor, I hope, has any colony the desire to offer her allegiance
at the price of preference in British markets. Even proposals for mutual
commercial benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier
principles than those of the market-place and the counting-house.”
At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher commercial
plane, exclaimed, “How be ye goin’ to get ‘em kept to, then?”
Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the audience asked
how they were to ensure that such arrangements would be adhered to. His
answer was in the words of the Duke of Dartmoor, “By the mutual esteem,
the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of the British race.”
Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless, at his own
incapacity to follow this high doctrine, exclaimed intemperately, “Oh,
shut up!” and the gathering, remembering that this, after all, was
not what it had come for, began to hint that it had had enough in
intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for “Murchison!”
Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer. He had a
trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he thought they would take as
a direct message from the distinguished nobleman who had uttered it.
The Marquis of Aldeburgh was the father of the pithy thing, which he had
presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The audience received
it with respect--Hesketh’s own respect was so marked--but with
misapprehension; there had been too many allusions to the nobility for a
community so far removed from its soothing influence. “Had ye no friends
among the commoners?” suddenly spoke up a dry old fellow, stroking a
long white beard; and the roar that greeted this showed the sense of the
meeting. Hesketh closed with assurances of the admiration and confidence
he felt toward the candidate proposed to their suffrages by the
Liberal party that were quite inaudible, and sought his yellow pinewood
schoolroom chair with rather a forced smile. It had been used once
before that day to isolate conspicuous stupidity.
They were at bottom a good-natured and a loyal crowd, and they had not,
after all, come there to make trouble, or Mr Alfred Hesketh might have
carried away a worse opinion of them. As it was, young Murchison,
whose address occupied the rest of the evening, succeeded in making
an impression upon them distinct enough, happily for his personal
influence, to efface that of his friend. He did it by the simple
expedient of talking business, and as high prices for produce and low
ones for agricultural implements would be more interesting there than
here, I will not report him. He and Mr Farquharson waited, after the
meeting, for a personal word with a good many of those present, but it
was suggested to Hesketh that the ladies might be tired, and that he had
better get them home without unnecessary delay. Mrs Farquharson had less
comment to offer during the drive home than Hesketh thought might be
expected from a woman of her intelligence, but Miss Milburn was very
enthusiastic. She said he had made a lovely speech, and she wished her
father could have heard it.
A personal impression, during a time of political excitement, travels
unexpectedly far. A week later Mr Hesketh was concernedly accosted in
Main Street by a boy on a bicycle.
“Say, mister, how’s the dook?”
“What duke?” asked Hesketh, puzzled.
“Oh, any dook,” responded the boy, and bicycled cheerfully, away.