The Imperialist - Sara Jeannette Duncan (general ebook reader .txt) 📗

She was identified with all the rest--I left it to her. Shortly before I sailed for Canada she spoke to me of marriage in connection with my work and--welfare, and with--a niece of her husband's who was staying with us at the time, a person suitable in every way. Apart from my aunt, I do not know--However, I owed everything to her, and I--took her advice in the matter. I left it to her. She is a managing woman; but she can nearly always prove herself right. Her mind ran a great deal, a little too much perhaps, upon creature comforts, and I suppose she thought that in emigrating a man might do well to companion himself."

"That was prudent of her," said Advena.

He turned a look upon her. "You are not--making a mock of it?" he said.

"I am not making a mock of it."

"My aunt now writes to me that Miss Christie's home has been broken up by the death of her mother, and that if it can be arranged she is willing to come to me here. My aunt talks of bringing her. I am to write."

He said the last words slowly, as if he weighed them. They had passed the turning to the Murchisons', walking on with the single consciousness of a path under them, and space before them. Once or twice before that had happened, but Advena had always been aware. This time she did not know.

"You are to write," she said. She sought in vain for more words; he also, throwing back his head, appeared to search the firmament for phrases without result. Silence seemed enforced between them, and walked with them, on into the murky landscape, over the fallen leaves. Passing a streetlamp, they quickened their steps, looking furtively at the light, which seemed leagued against them with silence.

"It seems so extraordinarily--far away," said Hugh Finlay, of Bross, Dumfries, at length.

"But it will come near," Advena replied.

"I don't think it ever can."

She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.

"They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and the man whom I remember to have been me--there is a gulf fixed--"

"It is only the Atlantic," Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.

He shook his head. "It is not marked in any geography," he said, and gave her a troubled smile. "How can I make it clear to you? I have come here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before. I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty and charm of mere vitality--you have always been so alive. One finds a physical freedom in which one's very soul seems to expand; one hears the happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to respond--"

The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm, healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his, could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.

It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short of man's dignity, of man's estate, for his own sake.

"It is a curious history," she said. "You are right in thinking I should not find it quite easy to understand. We make those--arrangements--so much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important than they are."

"But they are of the highest importance." He stopped short, confounded.

"I shall try to consecrate my marriage," he said presently, more to himself than to Advena.

Her thought told him bitterly: "I am afraid it is the only thing you can do with it," but something else came to her lips.

"I have not congratulated you. I am not sure," she went on, with astonishing candour, "whether I can. But I wish you happiness with all my heart. Are you happy now?"

He turned his great dark eyes on her. "I am as happy, I dare say, as I have any need to be."

"But you are happier since your letter came?"

"No," he said. The simple word fell on her heart, and she forbore.

They went on again in silence until they arrived at a place from which they saw the gleam of the river and the line of the hills beyond. Advena stopped.

"We came here once before together--in the spring. Do you remember?" she asked.

"I remember very well." She had turned, and he with her. They stood together with darkness about them, through which they could just see each other's faces.

"It was spring then, and I went back alone. You are still living up that street? Good night, then, please. I wish again--to go back--alone."

He looked at her for an instant in dumb bewilderment, though her words were simple enough. Then as she made a step away from him he caught her hand.

"Advena," he faltered, "what has happened to us? This time I cannot let you."


CHAPTER XIX

"Lorne," said Dora Milburn, in her most animated manner, "who do you think is coming to Elgin? Your London friend, Mr Hesketh! He's going to stay with the Emmetts, and Mrs Emmett is perfectly distracted; she says he's accustomed to so much, she doesn't know how he will put up with their plain way of living. Though what she means by that, with late dinner and afternoon tea every day of her life, is more than I know."

"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--and 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