“I shall be glad,” remarked his daughter Dora, “when this horrid election is over. It spoils everything.”
She spoke a little fretfully. The election and the matters it involved did interfere a good deal with her interest in life. As an occupation it absorbed Lorne Murchison even more completely than she occasionally desired; and as a topic it took up a larger share of the attention of Mr Alfred Hesketh than she thought either reasonable or pleasing. Between politics and boilers Miss Milburn almost felt at times that the world held a second place for her.
CHAPTER XXVIII
The progress of Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Christie Cameron up the river to Montreal, and so west to Elgin, was one series of surprises, most of them pleasant and instructive to such a pair of intelligent Scotchwomen, if we leave out the number of Roman Catholic churches that lift their special symbol along the banks of the St Lawrence and the fact that Hugh Finlay was not in Elgin to meet them upon their arrival. Dr Drummond, of course, was there at the station to explain. Finlay had been obliged to leave for Winnipeg only the day before, to attend a mission conference in place of a delegate who had been suddenly laid aside by serious illness. Finlay, he said, had been very loath to go, but there were many reasons why it was imperative that he should; Dr Drummond explained them all. “I insisted on it,” he assured them, frankly. “I told him I would take the responsibility.”
He seemed very capable of taking it, both the ladies must have thought, with his quick orders about the luggage and his waiting cab. Mrs Kilbannon said so. “I’m sure,” she told him, “we are better off with you than with Hugh. He was always a daft dependence at a railway station.”
They both—Mrs Kilbannon and Dr Drummond—looked out of the corners of their eyes, so to speak, at Christie, the only one who might be expected to show any sensitiveness; but Miss Cameron accepted the explanation with readiness. Indeed, she said, she would have been real vexed if Mr Finlay had stayed behind on her account—she showed herself well aware of the importance of a nomination, and the desirability of responding to it.
“It will just give me an opportunity of seeing the town,” she said, looking at it through the cab windows as they drove; and Dr Drummond had to admit that she seemed a sensible creature. Other things being equal, Finlay might be doing very well for himself. As they talked of Scotland—it transpired that Dr Drummond knew all the braes about Bross as a boy—he found himself more than ever annoyed with Finlay about the inequality of other things; and when they passed Knox Church and Miss Cameron told him she hadn’t realized it was so imposing an edifice, he felt downright sorry for the woman.
Dr Drummond had persuaded Finlay to go to Winnipeg with a vague hope that something in the fortnight’s grace thus provided, might be induced to happen. The form it oftenest took to his imagination was Miss Christie’s announcement, when she set foot upon the station platform, that she had become engaged, on the way over, to somebody else, some fellow-traveller. Such things, Dr Drummond knew, did come about, usually bringing distress and discomfiture in their train. Why, then, should they not happen when all the consequences would be rejoiceful?
It was plain enough, however, that nothing of the kind had come to pass. Miss Christie had arrived in Elgin, bringing her affections intact; they might have been in any one of her portmanteaux. She had come with definite calm intention, precisely in the guise in which she should have been expected. At the very hour, in the very clothes, she was there. Robust and pleasant, with a practical eye on her promising future, she had arrived, the fulfilment of despair. Dr Drummond looked at her with acquiescence, half-cowed, half-comic, wondering at his own folly in dreaming of anything else. Miss Cameron brought the situation, as it were, with her; it had to be faced, and Dr Drummond faced it like a philosopher. She was the material necessity, the fact in the case, the substantiation of her own legend; and Dr Drummond promptly gave her all the consideration she demanded in this aspect. Already he heard himself pronouncing a blessing over the pair—and they would make the best of it. With characteristic dispatch he decided that the marriage should take place the first Monday after Finlay’s return. That would give them time to take a day or two in Toronto, perhaps, and get back for Finlay’s Wednesday prayer meeting. “Or I could take it off his hands,” said Dr Drummond to himself. “That would free them till the end of the week.” Solicitude increased in him that the best should be made of it; after all, for a long time they had been making the worst. Mrs Forsyth, whom it had been necessary to inform when Mrs Kilbannon and Miss Cameron became actually imminent, saw plainly that the future Mrs Finlay had made a very good impression on the Doctor; and as nature, in Mrs Forsyth’s case, was more powerful than grace, she became critical accordingly. Still, she was an honest soul: she found more fault with what she called Miss Cameron’s “shirt-waists” than with Miss Cameron herself, whom she didn’t doubt to be a good woman though she would never see thirty-five again. Time and observation would no doubt mend or remodel the shirt-waists; and meanwhile both they and Miss Cameron would do very well for East Elgin, Mrs Forsyth avowed. Mrs Kilbannon, definitely given over to caps and curls as they still wear them in Bross, Mrs Forsyth at once formed a great opinion of. She might be something, Mrs Forsyth thought, out of a novel by Mr Crockett, and made you long to go to Scotland, where presumably everyone was like her. On the whole the ladies from Bross profited rather than lost by the new frame they stepped into in the house of Dr Drummond, of Elgin, Ontario. Their special virtues, of dignity and solidity and frugality, stood out saliently against the ease and unconstraint about them; in the profusion of the table it was little less than edifying to hear Mrs Kilbannon, invited to preserves, say, “Thank you, I have butter.” It was the pleasantest spectacle, happily common enough, of the world’s greatest inheritance. We see it in immigrants of all degrees, and we may perceive it in Miss Cameron and Mrs Kilbannon. They come in couples and in companies from those little imperial islands, bringing the crusted qualities of the old blood bottled there so long, and sink with grateful absorption into the wide bountiful stretches of the further countries. They have much to take, but they give themselves; and so it comes about that the Empire is summed up in the race, and the flag flies for its ideals.