The Imperialist (14 page)

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 have’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 school-house.

“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.

T
hey sat talking on the verandah in the close of the May evening, Mr. and Mrs. Murchison. The Plummer Place was the Murchison Place in the town’s mouth now, and that was only fair; the Murchisons had overstamped the Plummers. It lay about them like a map of their lives: the big horse-chestnut stood again in flower to lighten the spring dusk for them as it had done faithfully for thirty years. John was no longer in his shirt-sleeves; the growing authority of his family had long prescribed a black alpaca coat. He smoked his meerschaum with the same old deliberation, however, holding it by the bowl as considerately as he held its original, which lasted him fifteen years. A great deal of John Murchison’s character was there, in the way he held his pipe, his gentleness and patience, even the justice and repose and quiet strength of his nature. He smoked and read the paper, the unfailing double solace of his evenings. I should have said that it was Mrs. Murchison who talked. She had the advantage of a free mind, only subconsciously occupied with her white wool and agile needles; and John had frequently to
choose between her observations and the politics of the day.

“You saw Lorne’s letter this morning, father?”

John took his pipe out of his mouth.

“Yes,” he said.

“He seems tremendously taken up with Wallingham. It was all Wallingham, from one end to the other.”

“It’s not remarkable,” said John Murchison, patiently.

“You’d think he had nothing else to write about. There was that reception at Lord What-you-may-call-him’s, the Canadian Commissioner’s, when the Prince and Princess of Wales came, and brought their family. I’d like to have heard something more about that than just that he was there. He might have noticed what the children had on. Now that Abby’s family is coming about her I seem to have my hands as full of children’s clothes as ever I had. Abby seems to think there’s nothing like my old patterns; I’m sure I’m sick of the sight of them!”

Mr. Murchison refolded his newspaper, took his pipe once more from his mouth, and said nothing.

“John, put down that paper! I declare it’s enough to drive anybody crazy! Now look at that boy walking across the lawn. He does it every night, delivering the
Express
, and you take no more notice! He’s wearing a regular path!”

“Sonny,” said Mr. Murchison, as the urchin approached, “you mustn’t walk across the grass.”

“Much good that will do!” remarked Mrs. Murchison. “I’d teach him to walk across the grass, if – if it were my business. Boy – isn’t your name Willie Parker? Then it was your mother I promised the coat and the other things to, and you’ll find them ready there, just inside the hall door. They’ll make down very well for you, but you can tell her from me that
she’d better double-seam them, for the stuff’s apt to ravel. And attend to what Mr. Murchison says; go out by the gravel – what do you suppose it’s there for?”