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

West deposited Hugh Finlay upon the Elgin platform, the close of one of those wide, wet, uncertain February days when the call of spring is on the wind though spring is weeks away. The lights of the town flashed and glimmered down the streets under the bare swaying maple branches. The early evening was full of soft bluster; the air was conscious with an appeal of nature, vague yet poignant. The young man caught at the strange sympathy that seemed to be abroad for his spirit. He walked to his house, courting it, troubled by it. They were expecting him that evening at Dr Drummond's, and there it was his intention to go. But on his way he would call for a moment to see Advena Murchison. He had something to tell her. It would be news of interest at Dr Drummond's also; but it was of no consequence, within an hour or so, when they should receive it there, while it was of great consequence that Advena should hear it at the earliest opportunity, and from him. There is no weighing or analysing the burden of such a necessity as this. It simply is important: it makes its own weight; and those whom it concerns must put aside other matters until it has been accomplished. He would tell her: they would accept it for a moment together, a moment during which he would also ascertain whether she was well and strong, with a good chance of happiness--God protect her--in the future that he should not know. Then he would go on to Dr Drummond's.

The wind had risen when he went out again; it blew a longer blast, and the trees made a steady sonorous rhythm in it. The sky was full of clouds that dashed upon the track of a failing moon; there was portent everywhere, and a hint of tumult at the end of the street. No two ways led from Finlay's house to his first destination. River Street made an angle with that on which the Murchisons lived--half a mile to the corner, and three-quarters the other way. Drops drove in his face as he strode along against the wind, stilling his unquiet heart, that leaped before him to that brief interview. As he took the single turning he came into the full blast of the veering, irresolute storm. The street was solitary and full of the sound of the blown trees, wild and uplifting. Far down the figure of a woman wavered before the wind across the zone of a blurred lamp-post. She was coming toward him. He bent his head and lowered his umbrella and lost sight of her as they approached, she with the storm behind her, driven with hardly more resistance than the last year's blackened leaves that blew with her, he assailed by it and making the best way he could. Certainly the wind was taking her part and his, when in another moment her skirt whipped against him and he saw her face glimmer out. A mere wreck of lines and shadows it seemed in the livid light, with suddenly perceiving eyes and lips that cried his name. She had on a hat and a cloak, but carried no umbrella, and her hands were bare and wet. Pitifully the storm blew her into his arms, a tossed and straying thing that could not speak for sobs; pitifully and with a rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that refuge. A rising fear and a great solicitude laid a finger upon his craving embrace of her; he had a sense of something strangely different in her, of the unknown irremediable. Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had never been before; her plight but made her in a manner sweeter; the storm that brought her barricaded them in the empty spaces of the street with a divinely entreating solitude. He had been prepared to meet her in the lighted decorum of her father's house and he knew what he should say. He was not prepared to take her out of the tempest, helpless and weeping and lost for the harbour of his heart, and nothing could he say. He locked his lips against all that came murmuring to them. But his arms tightened about her and he drew her into the shelter of a wall that jutted out in the irregular street; and there they stood and clung together in a long, close, broken silence that covered the downfall of her spirit. It was the moment of their great experience of one another; never again, in whatever crisis, could either know so deep, so wonderful a fathoming of the other soul. Once as it passed, Advena put up her hand and touched his cheek: There were tears on it, and she trembled, and wound her arm about his neck, and held up her face to his. "No," he muttered, and crushed it against his breast. There without complaint she let it lie; she was all submission to him: his blood leaped and his spirit groaned with the knowledge of it.

"Why did you come out? Why did you come, dear?" he said at last.

"I don't know. There was such a wind. I could not stay in the house."

She spoke timidly, in a voice that should have been new to him, but that it was, above all, her voice.

"I was on my way to you."

"I know. I thought you might perhaps come. If you had not--I think I was on my way to you."

It seemed not unnatural.

"Did you find--any message from me when you came?" she asked presently, in a quieted, almost a contented tone.

It shot--the message--before his eyes, though he had seen it no message, in the preoccupation of his arrival.

"I found a rose on my dressing-table," he told her; and the rose stood for him in a wonder of tenderness, looking back.

"I smuggled it in," she confessed, "I knew your old servant--she used to be with us. The others--from Dr Drummond's--have been there all day making it warm and comfortable for you. I had no right to do anything like that, but I had the right, hadn't I, to bring the rose?"

"I don't know," he answered her, hard-pressed, "how we are to bear this."

She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of a surgeon's knife.

"We are not to bear it," she said eagerly. "The rose is to tell you that. I didn't mean it, when I left it, to be anything more--more than a rose; but now I do. I didn't even know when I came out tonight. But now I do. We aren't to bear it, Hugh. I don't want it so--now. I can't--can't have it so."

She came nearer to him again and caught with her two hands the lapels of his coat. He closed his own over them and looked down at her in that half-detachment, which still claimed and held her.

"Advena," he whispered, out of the sudden clamour in his mind, "she can't be--she isn't--nothing has happened to her?"

She smiled faintly, but her eyes were again full of fear at his implication of the only way.

"Oh, no!" she said. "But you have been away, and she has come. I have seen her; and oh! she won't care, Hugh--she won't care."

Her asking, straining face seemed to gather and reflect all the light there was in the shifting night about them. The rain had stopped, but the wind still hurtled past, whirling the leaves from one darkness to another. They were as isolated, as outlawed there in the wild wet wind as they were in the confusion of their own souls.

"We must care," he said helplessly, clinging to the sound and form of the words.

"Oh, no!" she cried. "No, no! Indeed I know now what is possible and what is not!"

For an instant her eyes searched the rigid lines of his face in astonishment. In their struggle to establish the impossible she had been so far ahead, so greatly the more confident and daring, had tempted him to such heights, scorning every dizzy verge, that now, when she turned quite back from their adventure, humbly confessing it too hard, she could not understand how he should continue to set himself doggedly toward it. Perhaps, too, she trusted unconsciously in her prerogative. He loved her, and she him: before she would not, now she would. Before she had preferred an ideal to the desire of her heart; now it lay about her; her strenuous heart had pulled it down to foolish ruin, and how should she lie abased with it and see him still erect and full of the deed they had to do?

"Come," he said, "let me take you home, dear," and at that and some accent in it that struck again at hope, she sank at his feet in a torrent of weeping, clasping them and entreating him, "Oh send her away! Send her away!"

He lifted her, and was obliged literally to support her. Her hat had fallen off; he stroked her hair and murmured such comfort to her as we have for children in their extremity, of which the burden is chiefly love and "Don't cry." She grew gradually quieter, drawing one knows not what restitution from the intrinsic in him; but there was no pride in her, and when she said "Let me go home now," it was the broken word of hapless defeat. They struggled together out into the boisterous street, and once or twice she failed and had to stop and turn. Then she would cling to a wall or a tree, putting his help aside with a gesture in which there was again some pitiful trace of renunciation. They went almost without a word, each treading upon the heart of the other toward the gulf that was to come. They reached it at the Murchisons' gate, and there they paused, as briefly as possible, since pause was torture, and he told her what he could not tell her before.

"I have accepted the charge of the White Water Mission Station in Alberta," he said. "I, too, learned very soon after I left you what was possible and what was not. I go as soon as--things can be set in order here. Good-bye, my dear love, and may God help us both."

She looked at him with a pitiful effort at a steady lip. "I must try to believe it," she said. "And afterward, when it comes true for you, remember this--I was ashamed."

Then he saw her pass into her father's house, and he took the road to his duty and Dr Drummond's.

His extremity was very great. Through it lines came to him from the beautiful archaic inheritance of his Church. He strode along hearing them again and again in the dying storm.


So, I do stretch my hands
To Thee my help alone;
Thou only understands
All my complaint and moan.


He listened to the prayer on the wind, which seemed to offer it for him, listened and was gravely touched. But he himself was far from the throes of supplication. He was looking for the forces of his soul; and by the time he reached Dr Drummond's door we may suppose that he had found them.

Sarah who let him in, cried, "How wet you are, Mr Finlay!" and took his overcoat to dry in the kitchen. The Scotch ladies, she told him, and Mrs Forsyth, had gone out to tea, but they would be back right away, and meanwhile "the Doctor" was expecting