“Do you owe any money in Ottawa?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I replied.
Then a wonderful thing happened. The Judge delivered himself of judgment in the case in the following words:
“The Court is of the opinion that a man who has succeeded in keeping a wife and family in Ottawa, for four years, on three dollars a day, and made no new debts in that time, should not be harassed by old debts. Discharged!”
If the kind judge had been less hasty he would have had an offer from me of two dollars per month, in settlement of the case, but the word “Discharged!” cancelled the whole thing, debt and costs. On hearing the judgment, the lawyer who was putting me through gaped in astonishment and sat down suddenly, while the other lawyers present laughed at his discomfiture. I gave him a smile myself, thanked the kind judge and withdrew, richer, without robbery, by about forty-five dollars.
CHAPTER XXI
Minister Two passed on, and Minister “Three” reigned in his stead. He had been acting Minister for nearly a year before the death of Two. Three was a successful business man, alert, brisk, far-seeing and active. Why he bothered with the game of politics I never could understand. He was a man of large means and did not need politics, except as an amusement. In the days of Ping-Pong, Three rose to be the Minister of Ways and Means, became a power of the first magnitude, made his blunder, which cost him his political head, and went back to the ways of peace and privacy.
In Ottawa, as elsewhere, there is society and Society. Political Society is not necessarily Society with the capital letter. Any Society is apt to be mixed, but the mixture in political circles is particularly amusing, one full of surprises and odd contrasts. A politician from a small town attired in his first evening dress, making a courageous attempt to appear perfectly at ease at levee or reception, is an amusing spectacle to the sophisticated. If you have ever seen a young pup, before he has found his legs, attempting to jump upon a chair which is twice as high as himself, you have some idea of how a rough-necked politician looks amongst people accustomed to a drawing-room.
Mr. and Mrs. Wesblock were in the political swim. We could not afford to be in it, but we could not afford to keep out of it. A Minister’s or Deputy’s invitation to an extra clerk is a compliment he must accept; it is nearly a command. Many an evening I have suffered agony for fear I should lose one or two of my very scarce and precious dollars in a game of ten cent draw poker in which I had to play whether I would or no. With Muriel’s assistance I managed to keep a bold front. Her pose of ease and contempt for small things, under difficult circumstances, is most convincing.
I must now return to the affairs of my wife’s family, and to my mother-in-law, who had become at length reconciled to me as a member of the family, and almost looked upon me as a son. It appears to be a kind of law in nature or society, that one individual of a family must be sacrificed, in one way or another, for the benefit of the rest. At least if it is not a law it is something which frequently happens, and the one offered up is often the best in the family. It happened so in the Joseph family. Of Mrs. Joseph’s three sons, the two elder ones went out into the world and made their own way, more or less successfully. The eldest son materially assisted his mother, up to the time of his marriage, after which the whole burden of Mrs. Joseph and her daughters fell upon the youngest son. He took up his load cheerfully and without complaint, bearing a grown man’s burden before he was much out of his teens.