The Imperialist (27 page)

“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 semi-detached 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 They were so completely the human pair as they sat together, withdrawn in comfort and shelter, absorbed in homely matters and in each other; it was easy to forget that they were only a picture, a sham, and that the reality lay farther on, in the early spring. It must have been hard for him to hear with out 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 some how 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 a 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!’”

M
iss 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’m 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.