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Imperialist

<h2> CHAPTER XXXIII </h2> “I understand how you must feel in the matter, Murchison, said Henry Cruickshank. “It’s the most natural thing in the world that you should want to clear yourself definitely, especially as you say, since the charges have been given such wide publicity. On the other hand, I think it quite possible that you exaggerate the inference that will be drawn from our consenting to saw off with the other side on the two principal counts.” “The inference will be,” said Lorne “that there’s not a pin to choose between Winter’s political honesty and my own. I’m no Pharisee, but I don’t think I can sit down under that. I can’t impair my possible usefulness by accepting a slur upon my reputation at the very beginning.” “Politics are very impersonal. It wouldn’t be remembered a year.” “Winter of course,” said young Murchison moodily, “doesn’t want to take any chances. He knows he’s done for if we go on. Seven years for him would put him pretty well out of politics. And it would suit him down to the ground to fight it over again. There’s nothing he would like better to see than another writ for South Fox.” “That’s all right,” the lawyer responded, “but Moneida doesn’t look altogether pleasant, you know. We may have good grounds for supposing that the court will find you clear of that business; but Ormiston, so far as I can make out, was playing the fool down there for a week before polling-day, and there are three or four Yellow Dogs and Red Feathers only too anxious to pay back a grudge on him. We’ll have to fight again, there’s no doubt about that. The only question is whether we’ll ruin Ormiston first or not. Have you seen Bingham?” “I know what Bingham thinks,” said Lorne, impatiently. “The Squire’s position is a different consideration. I don’t see how I can—However, I’ll go across to the committee room now and talk it over.” It is doubtful whether young Murchison knew all that Bingham thought; Bingham so seldom told it all. There were matters in the back of Bingham’s mind that prompted him to urge the course that Cruickshank had been empowered by the opposing counsel to suggest—party considerations that it would serve no useful purpose to talk over with Murchison. Bingham put it darkly when he said he had quite as much hay on his fork as he cared to tackle already, implying that the defence of indiscretions in Moneida was quite an unnecessary addition. Contingencies seemed probable, arising out of the Moneida charges that might affect the central organization of the party in South Fox to an extent wholly out of proportion with the mere necessity of a second election. Bingham talked it over with Horace Williams, and both of them with Farquharson; they were all there to urge the desirability of “sawing off” upon Lorne when he found them at headquarters. Their most potent argument was, of course, the Squire and the immediate dismissal that awaited him under the law if undue influence were proved against him. Other considerations found the newly elected member for South Fox obstinate and troublesome, but to that he was bound to listen, and before that he finally withdrew his objections. The election would come on again, as happened commonly enough. Bingham could point to the opening, in a few days, of a big flour-milling industry across the river, which would help; operations on the Drill Hall and the Post-Office would be hurried on at once, and the local party organization would be thoroughly overhauled. Bingham had good reason for believing that they could entirely regain their lost ground, and at the same time dissipate the dangerous impression that South Fox was being undermined. Their candidate gave a reluctant ear to it all, and in the end agreed to everything. So that Chief Joseph Fry—the White Clam Shell of his own lost fires—was never allowed the chance of making good the election losses of that year, as he had confidently expected to do when the charge came on; nor was it given to any of the Yellow Dogs and Red Feathers of Mr Cruickshank’s citation to boast at the tribal dog-feasts of the future, of the occasion on which they had bested “de boss.” Neither was any further part in public affairs, except by way of jocular reference, assigned to Finnigan’s cat. The proceedings of the court abruptly terminated, the judges reported the desirability of a second contest, and the public accepted with a wink. The wink in any form was hateful to Lorne Murchison, but he had not to encounter it long. The young man had changed in none of the aspects he presented to his fellow-citizens since the beginning of the campaign. In the public eye he wore the same virtues as he wore the same clothes; he summed up even a greater measure of success; his popularity was unimpaired. He went as keenly about the business of life, handling its details with the same capable old drawl. Only his mother, with the divination of mothers, declared that since the night of the opera house meeting Lorne had been “all worked up.” She watched him with furtive anxious looks, was solicitous about his food, expressed relief when she knew him to be safely in bed and asleep. He himself observed himself with discontent, unable to fathom his extraordinary lapse from self-control on the night of his final address. He charged it to the strain of unavoidable office work on top of the business of the campaign, abused his nerves, talked of a few days’ rest when they had settled Winter. He could think of nothing but the points he had forgotten when he had his great chance. “The flag should have come in at the end,” he would say to himself, trying vainly to remember where it did come in. He was ill pleased with the issue of that occasion; and it was small compensation to be told by Stella that his speech gave her shivers up and down her back. Meanwhile the theory of Empire coursed in his blood, fed by the revelation of the future of his country in every newspaper, by the calculated prophecies of American onlookers, and by the telegrams which repeated the trumpet notes of Wallingham’s war upon the mandarinate of Great Britain. It occupied him so that he began to measure and limit what he had to say about it, and to probe the casual eye for sympathy before he would give an inch of rope to his enthusiasm. He found it as hard as ever to understand that the public interest should be otherwise preoccupied, as it plainly was, that the party organ, terrified of Quebec, should shuffle away from the subject with perfunctory and noncommittal reference, that among the men he met in the street, nobody’s blood seemed stirred, whatever the day’s news was from England. He subscribed to the Toronto Post, the leading organ of the Tories, because of its fuller reports and more sympathetic treatment of the Idea, due to the fact that the Idea originated in a brain temporarily affiliated to the Conservative party. If the departure to imperial preference had any damage in it for Canadian interests, it would be for those which the Post made its special care; but the spirit of party draws the breath of expediency, and the Post flaunting the Union Jack every other day, put secondary manufactures aside for future discussion, and tickled the wheat-growers with the two-shilling advantage they were coming into at the hands of the English Conservatives, until Liberal leaders began to be a little anxious about a possible loss of wheat-growing votes. It was, as John Murchison said, a queer position for everybody concerned; queer enough, no doubt, to admit a Tory journal into the house on sufferance and as a special matter; but he had a disapproving look for it as it lay on the hall floor, and seldom was the first to open it. Nevertheless Lorne found more satisfaction in talking imperialism with his father than with anyone else. While the practical half of John Murchison was characteristically alive to the difficulties involved, the sentimental half of him was ready at any time to give out cautious sparks of sympathy with the splendour of Wallingham’s scheme; and he liked the feeling that a son of his should hark back in his allegiance to the old land. There was a kind of chivalry in the placing of certain forms of beauty—political honour and public devotion, which blossomed best, it seemed, over there—above the material ease and margin of the new country, and even above the grand chance it offered for a man to make his mark. Mr Murchison was susceptible to this in anyone, and responsive to it in his son. As to the local party leaders, they had little more than a shrug for the subject. So far as they were concerned, there was no Empire and no Idea; Wallingham might as well not have been born. It seemed to Lorne that they maintained toward him personally a special reticence about it. Reticence indeed characterized their behaviour generally during the period between the abandonment of the suits and the arrangement of the second Liberal convention. They had little advice for him about his political attitude, little advice about anything. He noticed that his presence on one or two occasions seemed to embarrass them, and that his arrival would sometimes have a disintegrating effect upon a group in the post-office or at a street corner. He added it, without thinking, to his general heaviness; they held it a good deal against him, he supposed, to have reduced their proud standing majority to a beggarly two figures; he didn’t blame them. I cannot think that the sum of these depressions alone would have been enough to overshadow so buoyant a soul as Lorne Murchison’s. The characteristics of him I have tried to convey were grafted on an excellent fund of common sense. He was well aware of the proportions of things; he had no despair of the Idea, nor would he despair should the Idea etherealize and fly away. Neither had he, for his personal honour, any morbid desires toward White Clam Shell or Finnigan’s cat. His luck had been a good deal better than it might have been; he recognized that as fully as any sensible young man could, and as for the Great Chance, and the queer grip it had on him, he would have argued that too if anyone had approached him curiously about it. There I think we might doubt his conclusions. There is nothing subtler, more elusive to trace than the intercurrents of the emotions. Politics and love are thought of at opposite poles, and Wallingham perhaps would have laughed to know that he owed an exalted allegiance in part to a half-broken heart. Yet the impulse that is beyond our calculation, the thing we know potential in the blood but not to be summoned or conditioned, lies always in the shadow of the ideal; and who can analyse that, and say, “Of this class is the will to believe in the integrity of the beloved and false; of that is the desire to lift a nation to the level of its mountain-ranges”? Both dispositions have a tendency to overwork the heart; and it is easy to imagine that they might interact. Lorne Murchison’s wish, which was indeed a burning longing and necessity, to believe in the Dora Milburn of his passion, had been under a strain since the night on which he brought her the pledge which she refused to wear. He had hardly been conscious of it in the beginning, but by constant suggestion it had grown into his knowledge, and for weeks he had taken poignant account of it. His election had brought him no nearer a settlement with her objection to letting the world know of their relations. The immediate announcement that it was to be disputed gave Dora another chance, and once again postponed the assurance that he longed for with a fever which was his own condemnation of her, if he could have read that sign. For months he had seen so little of her, had so altered his constant habit of going to the Milburns’, that his family talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful speculations. They did not wonder or speculate at the Milburns’. It was an axiom there that it is well to do nothing rashly. Lorne, in the office on Market Street, had been replying to Mr Fulke to the effect that the convention could hardly be much longer postponed, but that as yet he had no word of the date of it when the telephone bell rang and Mr Farquharson’s voice at the other end asked him to come over to the committee room. “They’ve decided about it now, I imagine,” he told his senior, putting on his hat; and something of the wonted fighting elation came upon him as he went down the stairs. He was right in his supposition. They had decided about it, and they were waiting, in a group that made every effort to look casual, to tell him when he arrived. They had delegated what Horace Williams called “the job” to Mr Farquharson, and he was actually struggling with the preliminaries of it, when Bingham, uncomfortable under the curious quietude of the young fellow’s attention, burst out with the whole thing. “The fact is, Murchison, you can’t poll the vote. There’s no man in the Riding we’d be better pleased to send to the House; but we’ve got to win this election, and we can’t win it with you.” “You think you can’t?” said Lorne. “You see, old man,” Horace Williams put in, “you didn’t get rid of that save-the-Empire-or-die scheme of yours soon enough. People got to think you meant something by it.” “I shall never get rid of it,” Lorne returned simply, and the others looked at one another. “The popular idea seems to be,” said Mr Farquharson judicially, “that you would not hesitate to put Canada to some material loss, or at least to postpone her development in various important directions, for the sake of the imperial connection.” “Wasn’t that,” Lorne asked him, “what, six months ago, you were all prepared to do?” “Oh, no,” said Bingham, with the air of repudiating for everybody concerned. “Not for a cent. We were willing at one time to work it for what is was worth, but it never was worth that, and if you’d had a little more experience, Murchison, you’d have realized it.” “That’s right, Lorne,” contributed Horace Williams. “Experience—that’s all you want. You’ve got everything else, and a darned sight more. We’ll get you there, all in good time. But this time—” “You want me to step down and out,” said Lorne. “That’s for you to say,” Bingham told him. “We can nominate you again all right, but we’re afraid we can’t get you the convention. Young and Windle have been working like moles for the past ten days—” “For Carter?” interrupted Lorne: “Carter, of course.” They nodded. Carter stood the admitted fact. “I’m sorry it’s Carter,” said Lorne thoughtfully. “However—” And he dropped, staring before him, into silence. The others eyed him from serious, underhung faces. Horace Williams, with an obvious effort, got up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Brace up, old chap,” he said. “You made a blame good fight for us, and we’ll do the same for you another day.” “However, gentlemen,” the young man gathered himself up to say, “I believe I understand the situation. You are my friends and this is your advice. We must save the seat. I’ll see Carter. If I can get anything out of him to make me think he’ll go straight on the scheme to save the Empire”—he smiled faintly—“when it comes to a vote, I’ll withdraw in his favour at the convention. Horace here will think up something for me—any old lie will do, I suppose? In any case, of course, I withdraw.” He took his hat, and they all got up, startled a little at the quick and simple close of the difficult scene they had anticipated. Horace Williams offered his hand. “Shake, Lorne,” he said, and the other two, coming nearer, followed his example. “Why, yes,” said Lorne. He left them with a brief excuse, and they stood together in a moment’s silence, three practical politicians who had delivered themselves from a dangerous network involving higher things. “Dash these heart-to-heart talks,” said Bingham irritably, “it’s the only thing to do, but why the devil didn’t he want something out of it? I had that Registrarship in my inside pocket.” “If anybody likes to kick me round the room,” remarked Horace Williams with depression, “I have no very strong objection.” “And now,” Mr Farquharson said with a sigh, “we understand it’s got to be Carter. I suppose I’m too old a man to do jockey for a three-year-old, but I own I’ve enjoyed the ride.” Lorne Murchison went out into the companionship of Main Street, the new check in his fortunes hanging before him. We may imagine that it hung heavily; we may suppose that it cut off the view. As Bingham would have said, he was “up against it” and that, when one is confidently treading the straight path to accomplishment, is a dazing experience. He was up against it, yet already he had recoiled far enough to consider it; already he was adapting his heart, his nerves, and his future to it. His heart took it greatly, told him he had not yet force enough for the business he had aspired to, but gave him a secret assurance. Another time he would find more strength and show more cunning; he would not disdain the tools of diplomacy and desirability, he would dream no more of short cuts in great political departures. His heart bowed to its sorry education and took counsel with him, bidding him be of good courage and push on. He was up against it, but he would get round it, and there on the other side lay the same wide prospect, with the Idea shining high. At one point he faltered, but that was a matter of expediency rather than of courage. He searched and selected, as he went along the street, among phrases that would convey his disaster to Dora Milburn. Just at that point, the turning to his own office, he felt it hard luck that Alfred Hesketh should meet and want a word with him. Hesketh had become tolerable only when other things were equal. Lorne had not seen him since the night of his election, when his felicitations had seemed to stand for very little one way or another. His manner now was more important charged with other considerations. Lorne waited on the word, uncomfortably putting off the necessity of coming out with his misfortune. “I haven’t come across you, Murchison, but you’ve had my sympathy, I needn’t say, all this time. A man can’t go into politics with gloves on, there’s no doubt about that. Though mind you, I never for a moment believed that you let yourself in personally. I mean, I’ve held you all through, above the faintest suspicion.” “Have you?” said Lorne. “Well, I suppose I ought to be grateful.” “Oh, I have—I assure you! But give me a disputed election for the revelation of a rotten state of things—eh?” “It does show up pretty low, doesn’t it?” “However, upon my word, I don’t know whether it’s any better in England. At bottom we’ve got a lower class to deal with, you know. I’m beginning to have a great respect for the electorate of this country, Murchison—not necessarily the methods, but the rank and file of the people. They know what they want, and they’re going to have it.” “Yes,” said Lorne, “I guess they are.” “And that brings me to my news, old man. I’ve given the matter a lot of time and a lot of consideration, and I’ve decided that I can’t do better than drive in a stake for myself in this new country of yours.” “It isn’t so very new,” Lorne told him, in rather dull response, “but I expect that’s a pretty good line to take. Why, yes—first rate.” “As to the line,” Hesketh went on, weightily, leading the way through an encumbering group of farmers at a corner, “I’ve selected that, too. Traction-engines. Milburn has never built them yet, but he says the opportunity is ripe—” “Milburn!” Lorne wheeled sharply. “My future partner. He was planning extensions just as I came along, a fortunate moment, I hope it will prove, for us both. I’d like to go into it with you, some time when you have leisure—it’s a scheme of extraordinary promise. By the way, there’s an idea in it that ought to appeal to you—driving the force that’s to subdue this wilderness of yours.” “When you’ve lived here for a while,” said Lorne, painfully preoccupied, “you’ll think it quite civilized. So you’re going in with Milburn?” “Oh, I’m proud of it already! I shall make a good Canadian, I trust. And as good an imperialist,” he added, “as is consistent with the claims of my adopted country.” “That seems to be the popular view,” said Lorne. “And a very reasonable view, too. But I’m not going to embark on that with you, old fellow—you shan’t draw me in. I know where you are on that subject.” “So do I—I’m stranded. But it’s all right—the subject isn’t,” Lorne said quietly; and Hesketh’s exclamations and inquiries brought out the morning’s reverse. The young Englishman was cordially sorry, full of concern and personal disappointment, abandoning his own absorbing affairs, and devoting his whole attention to the unfortunate exigency which Lorne dragged out of his breast, in pure manfulness, to lay before him. However, they came to the end of it, arriving at the same time at the door which led up the stairs to the office of Fulke, Warner, and Murchison. “Thank you,” said Lorne. ‘“Thank you. Oh, I dare say it will come all right in the course of time. You return to England, I suppose—or do you?—before you go in with Milburn?” “I sail next week,” said Hesketh, and a great relief shot into the face of his companion. “I have a good deal to see to over there. I shan’t get back much before June, I fancy. And—I must tell you—I am doing the thing very thoroughly. This business of naturalizing myself, I mean. I am going to marry that very charming girl—a great friend of yours, by the way, I know her to be—Miss Milburn.” For accepting the strokes of fate we have curiously trivial demonstrations. Lorne met Hesketh’s eye with the steadiness of a lion’s in his own; the unusual thing he did was to take his hands out of his pockets and let his arms hang loosely by his side. It was as tragic a gesture of helplessness as if he had flung them above his head. “Dora is going to marry you?” “I believe she will do me that honour. And I consider it an honour. Miss Milburn will compare with any English girl I ever met. But I half expected you to congratulate me. I know she wrote to you this morning—you were one of the first.” “I shall probably find the letter,” said Lorne mechanically, “when I go home.” He still eyed Hesketh narrowly, as if he had somewhere concealed about him the explanation of this final bitter circumstance. He had a desire not to leave him, to stand and parley—to go upstairs to the office would be to plunge into the gulf. He held back from that and leaned against the door frame, crossing his arms and looking over into the market-place for subjects to postpone Hesketh’s departure. They talked of various matters in sight, Hesketh showing the zest of his newly determined citizenship in every observation—the extension of the electric tramway, the pulling down of the old Fire Hall. In one consciousness Lorne made concise and relevant remarks; in another he sat in a spinning dark world and waited for the crash. It seemed to come when Hesketh said, preparing to go, “I’ll tell Miss Milburn I saw you. I suppose this change in your political prospects won’t affect your professional plans in any way you’ll stick on here, at the Bar?” It was the very shock of calamity, and for the instant he could see nothing in the night of it but one far avenue of escape, a possibility he had never thought of seriously until that moment. The conception seemed to form itself on his lips, to be involuntary. “I don’t know. A college friend has been pressing me for some time to join him in Milwaukee. He offers me plenty of work, and I am thinking seriously of closing with him.” “Go over to the United States? You can’t mean that!” “Oh yes—it’s the next best thing!” Hesketh’s face assumed a gravity, a look of feeling and of remonstrance. He came a step nearer and put a hand on his companion’s arm. “Come now, Murchison,” he said, “I ask you—is this a time to be thinking of chucking the Empire?” Lorne moved farther into the passage with an abruptness which left his interlocutor staring. He stood there for a moment in silence, and then turned to mount the stair with a reply which a passing dray happily prevented from reaching Hesketh’s ears. “No, damn you,” he said. “It’s not!” I cannot let him finish on that uncontrolled phrase, though it will be acknowledged that his provocation was great. Nor must we leave him in heavy captivity to the thought of oblivion in the unregarding welter of the near republic, of plunging into more strenuous activities and abandoning his ideal, in queer inverted analogy to the refuging of weak women in a convent. We know that his ideal was strong enough to reassert itself, under a keen irony of suggestion, in the very depth of his overwhelming: and the thing that could rise in him at that black moment may be trusted, perhaps, to reclaim his fortitude and reconsecrate his energy when these things come again into the full current of his life. The illness that, after two or three lagging days, brought him its merciful physical distraction was laid in the general understanding at the door of his political disappointment; and, among a crowd of sympathizers confined to no party, Horace Williams, as his wife expressed it, was pretty nearly wild during its progress. The power of the press is regrettably small in such emergencies, but what restoration it had Horace anxiously administered; the Express published a daily bulletin. The second election passed only half-noticed by the Murchison family; Carter very nearly re-established the Liberal majority. The Dominion dwelt upon this repeated demonstration of the strength of Reform principles in South Fox, and Mrs Murchison said they were welcome to Carter. Many will sympathize with Mrs Murchison at this point, I hope, and regret to abandon her in such equivocal approval of the circumstances which have arisen round her. Too anxiously occupied at home to take her share in the general pleasant sensation of Dr Drummond’s marriage, she was compelled to give it a hurried consideration and a sanction which was practically wrested from her. She could not be clear as to the course of events that led to it, nor entirely satisfied, as she said, about the ins and outs of the affair; this although she felt she could be clearer, and possibly had better grounds for being satisfied, than other people. As to Advena’s simple statement that Miss Cameron had made a second choice of the Doctor, changing her mind, as far as Mrs Murchison could see, without rhyme or reason, that Mrs Murchison took leave to find a very poor explanation. Advena’s own behaviour toward the rejection is one of the things which her mother declares, probably truly, that she never will understand. To pick up a man in the actual fling of being thrown over, will never, in Mrs Murchison’s eyes, constitute a decorous proceeding. I suppose she thinks the creature might have been made to wait at least until he had found his feet. She professes to cherish no antagonism to her future son-in-law on this account, although, as she says, it’s a queer way to come into a family; and she makes no secret of her belief that Miss Cameron showed excellent judgement in doing as she did, however that far-seeing woman came to have the opportunity. Hesketh had sailed before Lorne left his room, to return in June to those privileges and prospects of citizenship which he so eminently deserves to enjoy. When her brother’s convalescence and departure for Florida had untied her tongue, Stella widely proclaimed her opinion that Mr Hesketh’s engagement to Miss Milburn was the most suitable thing that could be imagined or desired. We know the youngest Miss Murchison to be inclined to impulsive views; but it would be safe, I think, to follow her here. Now that the question no longer circles in the actual vortex of Elgin politics Mr Octavius Milburn’s attitude toward the conditions of imperial connection has become almost as mellow as ever. Circumstances may arise any day, however, to stir up that latent bitterness which is so potential in him: and then I fear there will be no restraining him from again attacking Wallingham in the papers. Henry Cruickshank, growing old in his eminence and less secure, perhaps, in the increasing conflict of loud voices, of his own grasp of the ultimate best, fearing too, no doubt, the approach of that cynicism which, moral or immoral, is the real hoar of age, wrote to young Murchison while he was still examining the problems of the United States with the half-heart of the alien, and offered him a partnership. The terms were so simple and advantageous as only to be explicable on the grounds I have mentioned, though no phrase suggested them in the brief formulas of the letter, in which one is tempted to find the individual parallel of certain propositions of a great government also growing old. The offer was accepted, not without emotion, and there, too, it would be good to trace the parallel, were we permitted; but for that it is too soon, or perhaps it is too late. Here, for Lorne and for his country, we lose the thread of destiny. The shuttles fly, weaving the will of the nations, with a skein for ever dipped again; and he goes forth to his share in the task among those by whose hand and direction the pattern and the colours will be made. END <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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