“And wasn’t there something about his rebuilding the school-house at his own expense not so long ago?” asked Dr Drummond.
“Just what he did. I wanted to send Rawlins out and make a story of it—we’d have given it a column, with full heads; but the old man didn’t like it. It’s hard to know what some people will like. But it was my own foolishness for asking. A thing like that is public property.”
“There’s a good deal of feeling,” said Lorne. “So much that I understand the bank is moving for change of venue.”
“I hope they won’t get it,” said Dr Drummond sharply. “A strong local feeling is valuable evidence in a case like this. I don’t half approve this notion that a community can’t manage its own justice when it happens to take an interest in the case. I’ve no more acquaintance with the Squire than ‘How d’ye do?’ and I don’t know his son from Adam; but I’d serve on the jury tomorrow if the Crown asked it, and there’s many more like me.”
Mr Williams, who had made a brief note on his shirt cuff, restored his pencil to his waistcoat pocket. “I shall oppose a change of venue,” said he.
CHAPTER V
It was confidently expected by the Murchison family that when Stella was old enough she would be a good deal in society. Stella, without doubt, was well equipped for society; she had exactly those qualities which appealed to it in Elgin, among which I will mention two—the quality of being able to suggest that she was quite as good as anybody without saying so, and the even more important quality of not being any better. Other things being equal—those common worldly standards that prevailed in Elgin as well as anywhere else in their degree—other things being equal, this second simple quality was perhaps the most important of all. Mr and Mrs Murchison made no claim and small attempt upon society. One doubts whether, with children coming fast and hard times long at the door, they gave the subject much consideration; but if they did, it is highly unlikely to have occurred to them that they were too good for their environment. Yet in a manner they were. It was a matter of quality, of spiritual and mental fabric; they were hardly aware that they had it, but it marked them with a difference, and a difference is the one thing a small community, accustomed comfortably to scan its own intelligible averages, will not tolerate. The unusual may take on an exaggeration of these; an excess of money, an excess of piety, is understood; but idiosyncrasy susceptible to no common translation is regarded with the hostility earned by the white crow, modified among law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation. It is a sound enough social principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons. Such a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius, emancipated from the common interests, possibly inimical to the general good; and when, later on, your genius takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he has and gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd nods before the vindicating fact.
Nobody knew it at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons’ case. They had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren’t going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration. Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms. Once as a little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison’s reception of the suggested duty may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances—a trick like that! The inevitable hour arrived when she should be instructed on the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after her. She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage informed her family that it was a waste of money. She would hide in the hayloft with a novel; she would be off by herself in a canoe at six o’clock in the morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along in front of her “in a dream.” No one could dream with impunity in Elgin, except in bed. Mothers of daughters sympathized in good set terms with Mrs Murchison. “If that girl were mine—” they would say, and leave you with a stimulated notion of the value of corporal punishment. When she took to passing examinations and teaching, Elgin considered that her parents ought to be thankful in the probability that she had escaped some dramatic end. But her occupation further removed her from intercourse with the town’s more exclusive circles: she had taken a definite line, and she pursued it, preoccupied. If she was a brand snatched from the burning, she sent up a little curl of reflection in a safe place, where she was not further interrupted.
Abby, inheriting all these prejudices, had nevertheless not done so badly; she had taken no time at all to establish herself; she had almost immediately married. In the social estimates of Elgin the Johnsons were “nice people,” Dr Henry was a fine old figure in the town, and Abby’s chances were good enough. At all events, when she opened her doors as a bride, receiving for three afternoons in her wedding dress, everybody had “called.” It was very distinctly understood, of course, that this was a civility that need not lead to anything whatever, a kind of bowing recognition, to be formally returned and quite possibly to end there. With Abby, in a good many cases, it hadn’t ended there; she was doing very well, and as she often said with private satisfaction, if she went out anywhere she was just as likely as not to meet her brothers. Elgin society, shaping itself, I suppose, to ultimate increase and prosperity, had this peculiarity, that the females of a family, in general acceptance, were apt to lag far behind the males. Alec and Oliver enjoyed a good deal of popularity, and it was Stella’s boast that if Lorne didn’t go out much it needn’t be supposed he wasn’t asked. It was an accepted state of things in Elgin that young men might be invited without their sisters, implying an imperturbability greater than London’s, since London may not be aware of the existence of sisters, while Elgin knew all sorts of more interesting things about them. The young men were more desirable than the young women; they forged ahead, carrying the family fortunes, and the “nicest” of them were the young men in the banks. Others might be more substantial, but there was an allure about a young man in a bank as difficult to define as to resist. To say of a certain party-giver that she had “about every bank clerk in town” was to announce the success of her entertainment in ultimate terms. These things are not always penetrable, but no doubt his gentlemanly form of labour and its abridgement in the afternoons, when other young men toiled on till the stroke of six, had something to do with this apotheosis of the bank clerk, as well as his invariable taste in tailoring, and the fact that some local family influence was probably represented in his appointment. Privilege has always its last little stronghold, and it still operates to admiration on the office stools of minor finance in towns like Elgin. At all events, the sprouting tellers and cashiers held unquestioned sway—young doctors and lawyers simply didn’t think of competing; and since this sort of thing carries its own penalty, the designation which they shared with so many distinguished persons in history became a byword on the lips of envious persons and small boys, by which they wished to express effeminacy and the substantive of the “stuck-up.” “D’ye take me fur a bank clurk?” was a form of repudiation among corner loafers as forcible as it was unjustifiable.