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

him in the study--he knew the way.

Finlay did know the way but, as a matter of fact, there had been time for him to forget it; he had not crossed Dr Drummond's threshold since the night on which the Doctor had done all, as he would have said, that was humanly possible to bring him, Finlay, to reason upon the matter of his incredible entanglement in Bross. The door at the end of the passage was ajar however, as if impatient; and Dr Drummond himself, standing in it, heightened that appearance, with his "Come you in, Finlay. Come you in!"

The Doctor looked at the young man in a manner even more acute, more shrewd, and more kindly than was his wont. His eye searched Finlay thoroughly, and his smile seemed to broaden as his glance travelled.

"Man," he said, "you're shivering," and rolled him an armchair near the fire. ("The fellow came into the room," he would say, when he told the story afterward to the person most concerned, "as if he were going to the stake!") "This is extraordinary weather we are having, but I think the storm is passing over."

"I hope," said Finlay, "that my aunt and Miss Cameron are well. I understand they are out."

"Oh, very well--finely. They're out at present, but you'll see them bye-and-bye. An excellent voyage over they had--just the eight days. But we'll be doing it in less than that when the new fast line is running to Halifax. But four days of actual ocean travelling they say now it will take. Four days from imperial shore to shore! That should incorporate us--that should bring them out and take us home."

The Doctor had not taken a seat himself, but was pacing the study, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets; and a touch of embarrassment seemed added to the inveterate habit.

"I hear the ladies had pleasant weather." Finlay remarked.

"Capital--capital! You won't smoke? I know nothing about these cigars; they're some Grant left behind him--a chimney, that man Grant. Well, Finlay"--he threw himself into the arm-chair on the other side of the hearth--"I don't know what to say to you."

"Surely," said Finlay restively, "it has all been said, sir."

"No, it has not all been said," Dr Drummond retorted. "No, it has not. There's more to be said, and you must hear it, Finlay, with such patience as you have. But I speak the truth when I say that I don't know how to begin."

The young man gave him opportunity, gazing silently into the fire. He was hardly aware that Dr Drummond had again left his seat when he started violently at a clap on the shoulder.

"Finlay!" exclaimed the Doctor. "You won't be offended? No--you couldn't be offended!"

It was half-jocular, half-anxious, wholly inexplicable.

"At what," asked Hugh Finlay, "should I be offended?"

Again, with a deep sigh, the Doctor dropped into his chair. "I see I must begin at the beginning," he said. But Finlay, with sudden intuition, had risen and stood before him trembling, with a hand against the mantelpiece.

"No," he said, "if you have anything to tell me of importance, for God's sake begin at the end."

Some vibration in his voice went straight to the heart of the Doctor, banishing as it travelled, every irrelevant thing that it encountered.

"Then the end is this, Finlay," he said. "The young woman, Miss Christie Cameron, whom you were so wilfully bound and determined to marry, has thrown you over--that is, if you will give her back her word--has jilted you--that is, if you'll let her away. Has thought entirely better of the matter."

("He stared out of his great sockets of eyes as if the sky had fallen," Dr Drummond would say, recounting it.)

"For--for what reason?" asked Finlay, hardly yet able to distinguish between the sound of disaster and the sense that lay beneath.

"May I begin at the beginning?" asked the Doctor, and Hugh silently nodded.

("He sat there and never took his eyes off me, twisting his fingers. I might have been in a confession-box," Dr Drummond would explain to her.)

"She came here, Miss Cameron, with that good woman, Mrs Kilbannon, it will be three weeks next Monday," he said, with all the air of beginning a story that would be well worth hearing. "And I wasn't very well pleased to see her, for reasons that you know. However, that's neither here nor there. I met them both at the station, and I own to you that I thought when I made Miss Cameron's acquaintance that you were getting better than you deserved in the circumstances. You were a thousand miles away--now that was a fortunate thing!--and she and Mrs Kilbannon just stayed here and made themselves as comfortable as they could. And that was so comfortable that anyone could see with half an eye"--the Doctor's own eye twinkled--"so far as Miss Cameron was concerned, that she wasn't pining in any sense of the word. But I wasn't sorry for you, Finlay, on that account." He stopped to laugh enjoyingly, and Finlay blushed like a girl.

"I just let matters bide and went about my own business. Though after poor Mrs Forsyth here--a good woman enough, but the brains of a rabbit--it was pleasant to find these intelligent ladies at every meal, and wonderful how quick they were at picking up the differences between the points of Church administration here and at home. That was a thing I noticed particularly in Miss Cameron.

"Matters went smoothly enough--smoothly enough--till one afternoon that foolish creature Advena Murchison"--Finlay started--"came here to pay a call on Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. It was well and kindly meant, but it was not a wise-like thing to do. I didn't exactly make it out, but it seems that she came all because of you and on account of you; and the ladies didn't understand it, and Mrs Kilbannon came to me. My word, but there was a woman to deal with! Who was this young lady, and what was she to you that she should go anywhere or do anything in your name? Without doubt"--he put up a staying hand--"it was foolish of Advena. And what sort of freedom, and how far, and why, and what way, and I tell you it was no easy matter, to quiet her. 'Is Miss Cameron distressed about it?' said I. 'Not a bit,' said she, 'but I am, and I must have the rights of this matter,' said she, 'if I have to put it to my nephew himself.'

"It was at that point, Finlay, that the idea--just then that the thought came into my mind--well I won't say absolutely, but practically for the first time--Why can't this matter be arranged on a basis to suit all parties? So I said to her, 'Mrs Kilbannon,' I said, 'if you had reasonable grounds for it, do you think you could persuade your niece not to marry Hugh Finlay?' Wait--patience!" He held up his hand, and Finlay gripped the arm of his chair again.

"She just stared at me. 'Are you gone clean daft, Dr Drummond?' she said. 'There could be no grounds serious enough for that. I will not believe that Hugh Finlay has compromised himself in any way.' I had to stop her; I was obliged to tell her there was nothing of the kind--nothing of the kind; and later on I'll have to settle with my conscience about that. 'I meant,' I said, the reasonable grounds of an alternative: 'An alternative?' said she. To cut a long story short," continued the Doctor, leaning forward, always with the finger in his waistcoat pocket to emphasize what he said, "I represented to Mrs Kilbannon that Miss Cameron was not in sentimental relations toward you, that she had some reason to suspect you of having placed your affections elsewhere, and that I myself was very much taken up with what I had seen of Miss Cameron. In brief, I said to Mrs Kilbannon that if Miss Cameron saw no objection to altering the arrangements to admit of it, I should be pleased to marry her myself. The thing was much more suitable in every way. I was fifty-three years of age last week, I told her, 'but' I said, 'Miss Cameron is thirty-six or seven, if she's a day, and Finlay there would be like nothing but a grown-up son to her. I can offer her a good home and the minister's pew in a church that any woman might be proud of--and though far be it from me,' I said, 'to depreciate mission work, either home or foreign, Miss Cameron in that field would be little less than thrown away. Think it over,' I said.

"Well, she was pleased, I could see that. But she didn't half like the idea of changing the original notion. It was leaving you to your own devices that weighed most with her against it; she'd set her heart on seeing you married with her approval. So I said to her, to make an end of it, 'Well, Mrs Kilbannon,' I said, 'suppose we say no more about it for the present. I think I see the finger of Providence in this matter; but you'll talk it over with Miss Cameron, and we'll all just make it, for the next few days, the subject of quiet and sober reflection. Maybe at the end of that time I'll think better of it myself, though that is not my expectation.'

"'I think,' she said, 'we'll just leave it to Christie.'"

As the Doctor went on with his tale, relaxation had stolen dumbly about Finlay's brow and lips. He dropped from the plane of his own absorption to the humorous common sense of the recital: it claimed and held him with infinite solace. His eyes had something like the light of laughter in them, flashing behind a cloud, as he fixed them on Dr Drummond, and said, "And did you?"

"We did," said Dr Drummond, getting up once more from his chair, and playing complacently with his watch-charms as he took another turn about the study. "We left it to Miss Cameron, and the result is"--the Doctor stopped sharply and wheeled round upon Finlay--"the result is--why, the upshot seems to be that I've cut you out, man!"

Finlay measured the little Doctor standing there twisting his watch-chain, beaming with achieved satisfaction, in a consuming desire to know how far chance had been kind to him, and how far he had to be simply, unspeakably, grateful. He stared in silence, occupied with his great debt; it was like him that that, and not his liberty, should be first in his mind. We who have not his opportunity may find it more difficult to decide; but from our private knowledge of Dr Drummond we may remember what poor Finlay probably forgot at the moment, that even when pitted against Providence, the Doctor was a man of great determination.

The young fellow got up, still speechless, and confronted Dr Drummond. He was troubled for something to say; the chambers of his brain seemed empty or reiterating foolish sounds. He pressed the hand the minister offered him and his lips quivered. Then a light came into his face, and he picked up his hat.

"And I'll say this for myself," chuckled Dr Drummond. "It was no hard matter."

Finlay looked at him and smiled. "It would not be, sir," he said lamely. Dr Drummond cast a shrewd glance at him and dropped the tone of banter.

"Aye--I know! It's no joking matter," he said, and with a hand behind the young man's elbow, he half pushed him to the door and took out his