The Imperialist (21 page)

“Why, that’s splendid!” replied Lorne. “Good old Hesketh! I knew he thought of coming across this fall, but the brute hasn’t written to me. We’ll have to get him over to our place. When he gets tired of the Emmetts’ plain ways he can try ours – they’re plainer. You’ll like Hesketh; he’s a good fellow, and more go-ahead than most of them.”

“I don’t think I should ask him to stay if I were you, Lorne. Your mother will never consent to change her hours for meals. I wouldn’t dream of asking an Englishman to stay if I couldn’t give him late dinner; they think so much of it. It’s the trial of mother’s life that father will not submit to it. As a girl she was used to nothing else. Afternoon tea we do have, he
can’t prevent that, but father kicks at anything but one o’clock dinner and meat tea at six, and I suppose he always will.”

“Doesn’t one tea spoil the other?” Lorne inquired. “I find it does when I go to your minister’s and peck at a cress sandwich at five. You haven’t any appetite for a reasonable meal at six. But I guess it won’t matter to Hesketh; he’s got a lot of sense about things of that sort. Why he served out in South Africa – volunteered. Mrs. Emmett needn’t worry. And if we find him pining for afternoon tea we can send him over here.”

“Well, if he’s nice. But I suppose he’s pretty sure to be nice. Any friend of the Emmetts – What is he like, Lorne?”

“Oh, he’s just a young man with a moustache! You seem to see a good many over there. They’re all alike while they’re at school in round coats, and after they leave school they get moustaches, and then they’re all alike again.”

“I wish you wouldn’t tease. How tall is he? Is he fair or dark? What colour are his eyes?”

Lorne buried his head in his hands in a pretended agony of recollection.

“So far as I remember, not exactly tall, but you wouldn’t call him short. Complexion – well, don’t you know? – that kind of middling complexion. Colour of his eyes – does anybody ever notice a thing like that? You needn’t take my word for it, but I should say they were a kind of average coloured eyes.”

“Lorne! You
are
– I suppose I’ll just have to wait till I see him. But the girls are wild to know, and I said I’d ask you. He’ll be here in about two weeks anyhow, and I dare say we won’t find him so much to make a fuss about. The best sort of Englishmen don’t come over such a very great deal, as you say. I expect they have a better time at home.”

“Hesketh’s a very good sort of Englishman,” said Lorne.

“He’s awfully well off, isn’t he?”

“According to our ideas I suppose he is,” said Lorne. “Not according to English ideas.”

“Still less according to New York ones, then,” asserted Dora. “They wouldn’t think much of it there even if he passed for rich in England.” It was a little as if she resented Lorne’s comparison of standards, and claimed the American one as at least cis-Atlantic.

“He has a settled income,” said Lorne, “and he’s never had to work for it, whatever luck there is in that. That’s all I know. Dora –”

“Now Lorne, you’re not to be troublesome.”

“Your mother hasn’t come in at all this evening. Don’t you think it’s a good sign?”

“She isn’t quite so silly as she was,” remarked Dora. “Why I should not have the same freedom as other girls in entertaining my gentleman friends I never could quite see.”

“I believe if we told her we had made up our minds it would be all right,” he pleaded.

“I’m not so sure, Lorne. Mother’s so deep. You can’t always tell just by what she
does
. She thinks Stephen Stuart likes me – it’s too perfectly idiotic; we are the merest friends – when it’s any question of you and Stephen – well, she doesn’t say anything, but she lets me see! She thinks such a lot of the Stuarts because Stephen’s father was Ontario Premier once, and got knighted.”

“I might try for that myself if you think it would please her,” said the lover.

“Please her! And I should be Lady Murchison!” she let fall upon his ravished ears. “Why, Lorne, she’d just worship us both! But you’ll never do it.”

“Why not?”

Dora looked at him with pretty speculation. She had reasons for supposing that she did admire the young man.

“You’re too nice,” she said.

“That isn’t good enough,” he responded, and drew her nearer.

“Then why did you ask me? – No, Lorne, you are not to. Suppose father came in?”

“I shouldn’t mind – father’s on my side, I think.”

“Father isn’t on anybody’s side,” said his daughter, wisely.

“Dora, let me speak to him!”

Miss Milburn gave a clever imitation of a little scream of horror.

“Indeed
I won’t! Lorne, you are never,
never
to do that! As if we were in a ridiculous English novel!”

“That’s the part of an English novel I always like,” said Lorne. “The going and asking. It must about scare the hero out of a year’s growth; but it’s a glorious thing to do – it would be the next day, anyhow.”

“It’s just the sort of thing to please mother,” Dora meditated, “but she can’t be indulged all the time. No, Lorne, you’ll have to leave it to me – when there’s anything to tell.”

“There’s everything to tell now,” said he, who had indeed nothing to keep back.

“But you know what mother is, Lorne. Suppose they hadn’t any objection, she would never keep it to herself! She’d want to go announcing it all over the place; she’d think it was the proper thing to do.”

“But, Dora, why not? If you knew how I want to an nounce it! I should like to publish it in the sunrise – and the wind – so that I couldn’t go out of doors without seeing it myself.”

“I shouldn’t mind having it in
Toronto Society
, when the time comes. But not yet, Lorne – not for ages. I’m only twenty-two – nobody thinks of settling down nowadays before she’s twenty-five at the very earliest. I don’t know a single girl in this town that has – among my friends, anyway. That’s three years off, and you
can’t
expect me to be engaged for three years.”

“No,” said Lorne, “engaged six months, married the rest of the time. Or the periods might run concurrently if you preferred – I shouldn’t mind.”

“An engaged girl has the very worst time. She gets hardly any attention, and as to dances – well, it’s a good thing for her if the person she’s engaged to
can
dance,” she added, teasingly.

Lorne coloured. “You said I was improving, Dora,” he said, and then laughed at the childish claim. “But that isn’t really a thing that counts, is it? If our lives only keep step it won’t matter much about the ‘Washington Post.’ And so far as attention goes, you’ll get it as long as you live, you little princess. Besides, isn’t it better to wear the love of one man than the admiration of half a dozen?”

“And be teased and worried half out of your life by everybody you meet? Now, Lorne, you’re getting serious and sentimental, and you know I hate that. It isn’t any good either – mother always used to say it made me more stubborn to appeal to me. Horrid nature to have, isn’t it?”

Lorne’s hand went to his waistcoat pocket and came back with a tiny packet. “It’s come, Dora – by this morning’s English mail.”

Her eyes sparkled, and then rested with guarded excitement upon the little case. “Oh, Lorne!”

She said nothing more, but watched intently while he found the spring, and disclosed the ring within. Then she drew a long breath. “Lorne Murchison, what a lovely one!”

“Doesn’t it look,” said he, “just a little serious and sentimental?”

“But
such
good style, too,” she declared, bending over it. “And quite new – I haven’t seen anything a bit like it. I do love a design when it’s graceful. Solitaires are so old-fashioned.”

He kept his eyes upon her face, feeding upon the delight in it. Exultation rose up in him: he knew the primitive guile of man, indifferent to such things, alluring with them the other creature. He did not stop to condone her weakness; rather he seized it in ecstacy; it was all part of the glad scheme to help the lover. He turned the diamonds so that they flashed and flashed again before her. Then, trusting his happy instinct, he sought for her hand. But she held that back. “I want to
see
it,” she declared, and he was obliged to let her take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat elated and adoring, the simple fellow.

Reluctantly at last she gave up her hand.

“But it’s only trying on – not putting on,” she told him. He said nothing till it flashed upon her finger, and in her eyes he saw a spark from below of that instinctive cupidity toward jewels that man can never recognize as it deserves in woman, because of his desire to gratify it.

“You’ll wear it, Dora?” he pleaded.

“Lorne, you are the dearest fellow! But how could I? Everybody would guess!”

Her gaze, nevertheless, rested fascinated on the ring, which she posed as it pleased her.

“Let them guess! I’d rather they knew, but – it does look well on your finger, dear.”

She held it up once more to the light, then slipped it decisively off and gave it back to him. “I can’t, you know, Lorne. I didn’t really say you might get it; and now you’ll have to keep it till – till the time comes. But this much I will say – it’s the sweetest thing, and you’ve shown the loveliest taste, and if it weren’t such a dreadful give-away I’d like to wear it awfully.”

They discussed it with argument, with endearment, with humour, and reproach, but her inflexible basis soon showed through their talk: she would not wear the ring. So far he prevailed, that it was she, not he, who kept it. Her insistence that he should take it back brought something like anger out of him; and in the surprise of this she yielded so much. She did it unwillingly at the time, but afterward, when she tried on the thing again in the privacy of her own room, she was rather satisfied to have it, safe under lock and key, a flashing, smiling mystery to visit when she liked and reveal when she would.

“Lorne could never get me such a beauty again if he lost it,” she advised herself, “and he’s awfully careless. And I’m not sure that I won’t tell Eva Delarue, just to show it to her. She’s as close as wax.”

One feels a certain sorrow for the lover on his homeward way, squaring his shoulders against the foolish perversity of the feminine mind, resolutely guarding his heart from any hint of real reprobation. Through the sweetness of her lips and the affection of her pretty eyes, through all his half-possession of all her charms and graces, must have come dully the sense of his great occasion
manqué
, that dear day of love when it leaves the mark of its claim. And in one’s regret there is perhaps some alloy of pity, that less respectful thing. We know him elsewhere capable of essaying heights, yet we seem to look down upon the drama of his heart. It may be well to remember that the
level is not everything in love. He who carefully adjusts an intellectual machine may descry a higher mark; he can construct nothing in a mistress; he is, therefore, able to see the facts and to discriminate the desirable. But Lorne loved with all his imagination. This way dares the imitation of the gods, by which it improves the quality of the passion, so that such a love stands by itself to be considered, apart from the object, one may say. A strong and beautiful wave lifted Lorne Murchison along to his destiny, since it was the pulse of his own life, though Dora Milburn played moon to it.

A
lfred Hesketh had, after all, written to young Murchison about his immediate intention of sailing for Canada and visiting Elgin; the letter arrived a day or two later. It was brief and business-like, but it gave Lorne to understand that since his departure the imperial idea had been steadily fermenting, not only in the national mind, but particularly in Hesketh’s; that it produced in his case a condition only to be properly treated by personal experience. Hesketh was coming over to prove whatever advantage there was in seeing for yourself. That he was coming with the right bias Lorne might infer, he said, from the fact that he had waited a fortnight to get his passage by the only big line to New York that stood out for our mercantile supremacy against American combination.

“He needn’t bother to bring any bias,” Lorne remarked when he had read this, “but he’ll have to pay a lot of extra luggage on the one he takes back with him.”

He felt a little irritation at being offered the testimony of the Cunard ticket. Back on his native soil, its independence
ran again like sap in him: nobody wanted a present of goodwill; the matter stood on its merits.

He was glad, nevertheless, that Hesketh was coming, gratified that it would now be his turn to show prospects, and turn figure into facts, and make plain the imperial profit from the further side. Hesketh was such an intelligent fellow, there would be the keenest sort of pleasure in demonstrating things, big things, to him, little things, too, ways of living, differences of habit. Already in the happy exercise of his hospitable instinct he saw how Hesketh would get on with his mother, with Stella, with Dr. Drummond. He saw Hesketh interested, domiciled, remaining – the ranch life this side of the Rockies, Lorne thought, would tempt him, or something new and sound in Winnipeg. He kept his eye open for chances, and noted one or two likely things. “We want labour mostly,” he said to Advena, “but nobody is refused leave to land because he has a little money.”

“I should think not, indeed,” remarked Mrs. Murchison, who was present. “I often wish your father and I had had a little more when we began. That whole Gregory block was going for three thousand dollars then. I wonder what it’s worth now?”

“Yes, but you and father are worth more, too,” remarked Stella acutely.

“In fact, all the elder members of the family have approximated in value, Stella,” said her brother, “and you may too, in time.”

“I’ll take my chance with the country,” she retorted. They were all permeated with the question of the day; even Stella, after holding haughtily aloof for some time, had been obliged to get into step, as she described it, with the silly old Empire. Whatever it was in England, here it was a family affair; I mean in the town of Elgin, in the shops and the offices, up and down
the tree-bordered streets as men went to and from their business, atomic creatures building the reef of the future, but conscious, and wanting to know what they were about. Political parties had long declared themselves, the Hampden Debating Society had had several grand field nights. Prospective lifelong friendships, male and female, in every form of “the Collegiate,” had been put to this touchstone, sometimes with shattering effect. If you would not serve with Wallingham the greatness of Britain you were held to favour going over to the United States; there was no middle course. It became a personal matter in the ward schools, and small boys pursued small boys with hateful cries of “Annexationist!” The subject even trickled about the apple-barrels and potato-bags of the market square. Here it should have raged, pregnant as it was with bucolic blessing; but our agricultural friends expect nothing readily except adverse weather, least of all a measure of economic benefit to themselves. Those of Fox County thought it looked very well, but it was pretty sure to work out some other way. Elmore Crow failed heavily to catch a light even from Lorne Murchison.