The Imperialist (29 page)

Though brief, nothing could have been more to the purpose, and Hesketh sacrificed several effective points to hurry to the quotation –

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 ante-room 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 towards 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.

C
hristmas came and went. Dr. Drummond had long accepted the innovation of a service on Christmas Day, as he agreed to the anthem while the collection was being taken up, to flowers about the pulpit, and to the habit of sitting at prayer. He was a progressive by his business instinct, in everything but theology, where perhaps his business instinct also operated the other way, in favour of the sure thing. The Christmas Day service soon became one of those “special” occasions so dear to his heart, which made a demand upon him out of the ordinary way. He rose to these on the wing of the eagle, and his congregation never lacked the lesson that could be most dramatically drawn from them. His Christmas Day discourse gathered everything into it that could emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints’ days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of
hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and principle relentlessly indicated. Dr. Drummond loved, as I have said, all that asked for notable comment; the poet and the tragedian in him caught at the opportunity, and revelled in it. Public events carried him far, especially if they were disastrous, but what he most profited by was the dealing of Providence with members of his own congregation. Of all the occasions that inspired him, the funeral sermon was his happiest opportunity, nor was it, in his hands, by any means unstinted eulogy. Candid was his summing-up, behind the decent veil, the accepted apology of death; he was not afraid to refer to the follies of youth or the weaknesses of age in terms as unmistakable as they were kindly.

“Grace,” he said once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, “did more for her than ever nature had done.” He repeated it, too. “She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature,” and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice when the loss he deplored was that of a youth of virtue and promise, or that of a personal friend. His very text would be a blow upon the heart; the eyes filled from the beginning. People would often say that they were “sorry for the family,” sitting through Dr. Drummond’s celebration of their bereavement; and the sympathy was probably well founded. But how fine he was when he paid the last tribute to that upright man, his elder and office-bearer, David Davidson! How his words marched, sorrowing to the close! “Much I have said of him, and more than he would have had me say.” Will it not stay with those who heard it till the very end, the trenchant, mournful fall of that “more than he would have had me say”?

It was a thing that Hugh Finlay could not abide in Dr. Drummond.

As the winter passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr. Drummond liked a pretty definite parallel; he had small opinion of the practice of drawing a pint out of a thimble, as he considered Finlay must have done when he preached the gospel of imperialism from Deuteronomy xxx. 14. “For the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” Moreover, to preach politics in Knox Church was a liberty in Finlay.

The fact that Finlay had been beforehand with him operated perhaps to reconcile the Doctor to his difficulty; and the candidature of one of his own members in what was practically the imperial interest no doubt increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless, he would not lose sight of the matter for more than two or three weeks together. Many an odd blow he delivered for its furtherance by way of illustrating higher things, and he kept it always, so to speak, in the practical politics of the long prayer.

It was Sunday evening, and Abby and her husband, as usual, had come to tea. The family was complete with the exception of Lorne, who had driven out to Clayfield with Horace Williams, to talk over some urgent matters with persons whom he would meet at supper at the Metropole Hotel at Clayfield. It was a thing Mrs. Murchison thought little short of
scandalous – supper to talk business on the Sabbath day, and in an hotel, a place of which the smell about the door was enough to knock you down, even on a weekday. Mrs. Murchison considered, and did not scruple to say so, that politics should be let alone on Sundays. Clayfield votes might be very important, but there were such things as commandments, she supposed. “It’ll bring no blessing,” she declared severely, eyeing Lorne’s empty place.

The talk about the lamplit table was, nevertheless, all of the election, blessed or unblessed. It was not in human nature that it shouldn’t be, as Mrs. Murchison would have very quickly told you if you had found her inconsistent. There was reason in all things, as she frequently said.

“I hear,” Alec had told them, “that Octavius Milburn is going around bragging he’s got the Elgin Chamber of Commerce consolidated this time.”

“Against us?” exclaimed Stella; and her brother said, “Of course!”

“Those Milburns,” remarked Mrs. Murchison, “are enough to make one’s blood boil. I met Mrs. Milburn in the market yesterday; she’d been pricing Mrs. Crow’s ducks, and they were just five cents too dear for her, and she stopped – wonderful thing for her – and had
such
an amount to say about Lorne, and the honour it was, and the dear only knows what! Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth – and Octavius Milburn doing all he knew against him the whole time! That’s the Milburns! I cut her remarkably short,” Mrs. Murchison added, with satisfaction, “and when she’d made up her mind she’d have to give that extra five cents for the ducks because there weren’t any others to be had, she went back and found I’d bought them.”

“Well done, mother!” said Alec, and Oliver remarked
that if those were to-day’s ducks they were too good for the Milburn crowd, a lot.

“I expect she wanted them, too,” remarked Stella. “They’ve got the only Mr. Hesketh staying with them now. Miss Filkin’s in a great state of excitement.”

“I guess we can spare them Hesketh,” said John Murchison.

“He’s a lobster,” said Stella with fervour.

“He seems to bring a frost where he goes,” continued Abby’s husband, “in politics, anyhow. I hear Lorne wants to make a present of him to the other side, for use wherever they’ll let him speak longest. Is it true he began his speech out at Jordanville – ‘Gentlemen – and those of you who are not gentlemen’?”

“Could he have meant Mrs. Farquharson and Miss Milburn?” asked Mr. Murchison quietly, when the derision subsided; and they laughed again.

“He told me,” said Advena, “that he proposed to convert Mr. Milburn to the imperial policy.”

“He’ll have his job cut out for him,” said her father.

“For my part,” Abby told them, “I think the Milburns are beneath contempt. You don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something
about
them – not that we ever come in contact with them,” she continued with dignity. “I believe they used to be patients of Dr. Henry’s till he got up in years, but they don’t call in Harry.”

“Maybe that’s what there is about them,” said Mr. Murchison, innocently.

“Father’s made up his mind,” announced Dr. Harry, and they waited breathless. There could be only one point upon which Dr. Henry could be dubitating at that moment.

“He’s going to vote for Lorne.”

“He’s a lovely old darling!” cried Stella. “Good for Dr. Henry Johnson! I knew he would.”

The rest were silent with independence and gratification. Dr. Henry’s Conservatism had been supposed to be invincible. Dr. Harry they thought a fair prey to Murchison influence, and he had capitulated early, but he had never promised to answer for his father.

“Yes, he’s taken his time about it, and he’s consulted about all the known authorities,” said his son, humorously. “Went right back to the Manchester school to begin with – sat out on the verandah reading Cobden and Bright the whole summer; if anybody came for advice sent ’em in to me. I did a trade, I tell you! He thought they talked an awful lot of sense, those fellows – from the English point of view. ‘D’ye mean to tell me,’ he’d say, ‘that a generation born and bred in political doctrine of that sort is going to hold on to the colonies at a sacrifice? They’d rather let ’em go at a sacrifice!’ Well, then he got to reading the other side of the question, and old Ormiston lent him Parkin, and he lent old Ormiston Goldwin Smith, and then he subscribed to the
Times
for six months – the bill must have nearly bust him; and then the squire went over without waiting for him and without any assistance from the
Times
either; and finally – well, he says that if it’s good enough business for the people of England it’s good enough business for him. Only he keeps on worrying about the people of England, and whether they’ll make enough by it to keep them contented, till he can’t half enjoy his meals. And though he’s going to vote for Lorne next month all right, he wants it to be distinctly understood that family connection has nothing to do with it.”