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<h2> CHAPTER XII </h2>
<p>It was the talk of the town, the pride of the market-place, Lorne
Murchison’s having been selected to accompany what was known as the
Cruickshank deputation to England. The general spirit of congratulation
was corrected by a tendency to assert it another proof of sagacity on the
chairman’s part; Elgin wouldn’t be too flattered; Lawyer Cruickshank
couldn’t have done better. You may be sure the Express was well ahead with
it. “Honour to Our Young Fellow Townsman. A Well-Merited Compliment,” and
Rawlins was round promptly next morning to glean further particulars. He
found only Mrs Murchison, on a stepladder tying up the clematis that
climbed about the verandah, and she told him a little about clematis and a
good deal about the inconvenience of having to abandon superintending the
spring cleaning in order to get Lorne ready to go to the Old Country at
such short notice, but nothing he could put in the paper. Lorne, sought at
the office, was hardly more communicative. Mr Williams himself dropped in
there. He said the Express would now have a personal interest in the
object of the deputation, and proposed to strike out a broad line, a
broader line than ever.</p>
<p>“We’ve got into the way of taking it for granted,” said Mr Williams, “that
the subsidy idea is a kind of mediaeval idea. Raise a big enough shout and
you get things taken for granted in economics for a long while. Conditions
keep changing, right along, all the time, and presently you’ve got to
reconsider. There ain’t any sort of ultimate truth in the finest economic
position, my son; not any at all.”</p>
<p>“We’ll subsidize over here, right enough,” said Lorne.</p>
<p>“That’s the idea—that’s the prevailing idea, just now. But lots of
people think different—more than you’d imagine. I was talking to old
man Milburn just now—he’s dead against it. ‘Government has no
business,’ he said, ‘to apply the taxes in the interests of any company.
It oughtn’t to know how to spell “subsidy.” If the trade was there it
would get itself carried,’ he said.”</p>
<p>“Well, that surprises me,” said Lorne.</p>
<p>“Surprised me, too. But I was on the spot with him; just thought of it in
time. ‘Well, now, Mr Milburn,’ I said, ‘you’ve changed your mind. Thought
that was a thing you Conservatives never did,’ I said. ‘We don’t—I
haven’t,’ he said. ‘What d’ye mean? Twenty-five years ago,’ I said, ‘when
you were considering whether you’d start the Milburn Boiler Works here or
in Hamilton, Hamilton offered you a free site, and Elgin offered you a
free site and a dam for your water power. You took the biggest subsidy an’
came here,’ I said.”</p>
<p>Lorne laughed: “What did he say to that?”</p>
<p>“Hadn’t a word. ‘I guess it’s up to me,’ he said. Then he turned round and
came back. ‘Hold on, Williams; he said. ‘You know so much already about my
boiler works, it wouldn’t be much trouble for you to write out an account
of them from the beginning, would it? Working in the last quarter of a
century of the town’s progress, you know, and all that. Come round to the
office tomorrow, and I’ll give you some pointers.’ And he fixed up a
two-column ad right away. He was afraid I’d round on him, I suppose, if I
caught him saying anything more about the immorality of subsidies.”</p>
<p>“He won’t say anything more.”</p>
<p>“Probably not. Milburn hasn’t got much of a political conscience, but he’s
got a sense of what’s silly. Well, now, I expect you want all the time
there is.”</p>
<p>Mr Williams removed himself from the edge of the table, which was strewn
with maps and bluebooks, printed official, and typewritten demi-official
papers.</p>
<p>“Give ‘em a notion of those Assiniboian wheat acres, my boy, and the ranch
country we’ve got; tell ‘em about the future of quick passage and cold
storage. Get ‘em a little ashamed to have made so many fortunes for Yankee
beef combines; persuade ‘em the cheapest market has a funny way of getting
the dearest price in the end. Give it ‘em, Lorne, hot and cold and
fricasseed. The Express will back you up.”</p>
<p>He slapped his young friend’s shoulder, who seemed occupied with matters
that prevented his at once feeling the value of this assurance. “Bye-bye,”
said Mr Williams. “See you again before you start.”</p>
<p>“Oh, of course!” Lorne replied. “I’ll—I’ll come round. By the way,
Williams, Mr Milburn didn’t say anything—anything about me in
connection with this business? Didn’t mention, I suppose, what he thought
about my going?”</p>
<p>“Not a word, my boy! He was away up in abstract principles; he generally
is. Bye-bye.”</p>
<p>“It’s gone to his head a little bit—only natural,” Horace reflected
as he went down the stairs. “He’s probably just feeding on what folks
think of it. As if it mattered a pin’s head what Octavius Milburn thinks
or don’t think!”</p>
<p>Lorne, however, left alone with his customs returns and his immigration
reports, sat still, attaching a weight quite out of comparison with a
pin’s head to Mr Milburn’s opinion. He turned it over and over, instead of
the tabulated figures that were his business: he had to show himself his
way to the conclusion that such a thing could not matter seriously in the
end, since Milburn hadn’t a dollar involved—it would be different if
he were a shareholder in the Maple Line. He wished heartily, nevertheless,
that he could demonstrate a special advantage to boiler-makers in
competitive freights with New York. What did they import, confound them!
Pig-iron? Plates and rivets? Fortunately he was in a position to get at
the facts, and he got at them with an interest of even greater intensity
than he had shown to the whole question since ten that morning. Even now,
the unprejudiced observer, turning up the literature connected with the
Cruickshank deputation, may notice a stress laid upon the advantages to
Canadian importers of ore in certain stages of manufacture which may
strike him as slightly, very slightly, special. Of course there are a good
many of them in the country. So that Mr Horace Williams was justified to
some extent in his kindly observation upon the excusable egotism of youth.
Two or three letters, however, came in while Lorne was considering the
relation of plates and rivets to the objects of his deputation. They were
all congratulatory; one was from the chairman of the Liberal Association
at its headquarters in Toronto. Lorne glanced at them and stowed them away
in his pocket. He would read them when he got home, when it would be a
pleasure to hand them over to his mother. She was making a collection of
them.</p>
<p>He had a happy perception that same evening that Mr Milburn’s position was
not, after all, finally and invincibly taken against the deputation and
everything—everybody—concerned with it. He met that gentleman
at his own garden gate. Octavius paused in his exit, to hold it open for
young Murchison, thus even assisting the act of entry, a thing which
thrilled Lorne sweetly enough when he had time to ponder its possible
significance. Alas! the significance that lovers find! Lorne read a world
in the behaviour of Dora’s father in holding the gate open. He saw
political principle put aside in his favour, and social position forgotten
in kindness to him. He saw the gravest, sincerest appreciation of his
recent success, which he took as humbly as a dog will take a bone; he read
a fatherly thought at which his pulses bounded in an arrogance of triumph,
and his heart rose to ask its trust. And Octavius Milburn had held the
gate open because it was more convenient to hold it open than to leave it
open. He had not a political view in the world that was calculated to
affect his attitude toward a practical matter; and his opinion of Lorne
was quite uncomplicated: he thought him a very likely young fellow.
Milburn himself, in the Elgin way, preferred to see no great significance
of this sort anywhere. Young people were young people; it was natural
enough that they should like each other’s society. They, the Milburns,
were very glad to see Mr Murchison, very glad indeed. It was frequent
matter for veiled humorous reference at the table that he had been to call
again, at which Dora would look very stiff and dignified, and have to be
coaxed back into the conversation. As to anything serious, there was no
hurry; plenty of time to think of that. Such matters dwelt under the
horizon; there was no need to scan them closely; and Mr Milburn went his
way, conscious of nothing more than a comfortable gratification that Dora,
so far as the young men were concerned, seemed as popular as other girls.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“No, indeed,” said Lorne.</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>“I hope I shall not be so busy as that, Miss Filkin.”</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>“I expect,” said Lorne simply, “to like it better.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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 haven’t got so many Wallinghams.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Lorne sprang to open the window, while Miss Filkin, murmuring that it had
been a beautiful day, moved a little farther from it.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>Mr Murchison said that he had been able to get down to the club only once.</p>
<p>“The courts aren’t a bit in good order. They want about a week’s rolling.
The balls get up anywhere,” said Dora.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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 schoolhouse.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“What I am dying to know,” said Miss Filkin, in a sprightly way, “is
whether he is black or white!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“You know,” said Dora, “I hate your going, Lorne!”</p>
<p>She did indeed seem moved, about the mouth, to discontent. There was some
little injury in the way she swung her foot.</p>
<p>“I was hoping Mr Fulke wouldn’t get better in time; I was truly!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Oh, it’s a good thing to go, Dora.”</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>“I’m awfully sorry!” said Lorne. “I wish—”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>“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—”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“I’ll try to survive not having been asked. But I’m glad you wore the
roses, Dora.”</p>
<p>“I dropped one, and Phil Carter wanted to keep it. He’s so silly!”</p>
<p>“Did you—did you let him keep it?”</p>
<p>“Lorne Murchison! Do you think I’d let any man keep a rose I’d been
wearing?”</p>
<p>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—”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“It’s too faded for your buttonhole,” she said.</p>
<p>“It needn’t stay in my buttonhole. I know lots of other places!” he
begged.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“It spoils the bunch,” she said prettily. “If I give you this you will
have to give me something to take its place.”</p>
<p>“I will,” said Lorne.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>She rose beside him as she spoke, graceful and fair, to fasten it in; and
it was his hand that shook.</p>
<p>“Then may I choose it?” said Lorne. “And will you wear it?”</p>
<p>“I suppose you may. Why are you—why do you—Oh, Lorne, stand
still!”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
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