The Imperialist (11 page)

“Why, yes. I suppose he must be. It’s a good while since you went West. Well, what sort of a country have they got out Swan River way? Booming right along?”

“Boom nothing. I don’t mean to say there’s anything the matter with the country; there ain’t; but you’ve got to get up just as early in the mornings out there as y’do anywhere, far’s I noticed. An’ it’s a lonesome life. Now I
am
back I don’t know but little old Ontario’s good enough for me. ’N I hear you’ve taken up the law, Lorne. Y’always had a partiality for it, d’y’ remember, up there to the Collegiate? I used to think it’d be fine to travel with samples, those days. But you were dead gone on the law. ’N by all reports it pans out pretty well, don’t it?”

The young men had taken their way among the shifting crowd together. Lorne Murchison, although there was something too large about him for the town’s essential stamp, made by contrast as he threaded the desultory groups of country people, a type of the conventional and the formed; his companion glanced at him now and then with admiration. The values of carriage and of clothes are relative: in Fifth Avenue
Lorne would have looked countrified, in Piccadilly colonial. Districts are imaginable, perhaps not in this world, where the frequenters of even those fashionable thoroughfares would attract glances of curiosity by their failure to achieve the common standard in such things. Lorne Murchison, to dismiss the matter, was well up to the standard of Elgin, though he wore his straw hat quite on the back of his head and buried both hands in his trouser pockets. His eye was full of pleasant easy familiarity with the things he saw, and ready to see larger things; it had that beam of active inquiry, curious but never amazed, that marks the man likely to expand his horizons. Meanwhile he was on capital terms with his little world, which seemed to take pleasure in hailing him by his Christian name; even morose Jim Webster, who had failed three times in groceries, said “Morning, Lorne,” with a look of toleration. He moved alertly, the poise of his head was sanguine; the sun shone on him, the timidest soul came nearer to him. He and Elmore Crow, who walked beside him, had gone through the lower forms of the Elgin Collegiate Institute together, that really “public” kind of school which has so much to do with reassorting the classes of a new country. The Collegiate Institute took in raw material and turned out teachers, more teachers than anything. The teachers taught, chiefly in rural districts where they could save money, and with the money they saved changed themselves into doctors, Fellows of the University, mining engineers. The Collegiate Institute was a potential melting-pot: you went in as your simple opportunities had made you; how you shaped coming out depended upon what was hidden in the core of you. You could not in any case be the same as your father before you; education in a new country is too powerful a stimulant for that, working upon material too plastic and too hypothetical; it is not yet a
normal force, with an operation to be reckoned on with confidence. It is indeed the touchstone for character in a new people, for character acquired as apart from that inherited; it sometimes reveals surprises. Neither Lorne Murchison nor Elmore Crow illustrate this point very nearly. Lorne would have gone into the law in any case, since his father was able to send him, and Elmore would inevitably have gone back to the crops since he was early defeated by any other possibility. Nevertheless, as they walk together in my mind along the Elgin market square, the Elgin Collegiate Institute rises infallibly behind them, a directing influence and a responsible parent. Lorne was telling his great news.

“You don’t say!” remarked Elmore in response to it. “Lumbago is it? Pa’s subject to that too; gets an attack most springs. Mr. Fulke’ll have to lay right up – it’s the only thing.”

“I’m afraid he will. And Warner never appeared in court in his life.”

“What d’ye keep Warner for, then?”

“Oh, he does the conveyancing. He’s a good conveyancer, but he isn’t any pleader and doesn’t pretend to be. And it’s too late to transfer the case; nobody could get to the bottom of it as we have in the time. So it falls on me.”

“Caesar, his ghost! How d’ye feel about it, Lorne? I’d be scared green. Y’don’t
talk
nervous. Now I bet you get there with both feet.”

“I hope to get there,” the young lawyer answered; and as he spoke a concentration came into his face which drove the elation and everything else that was boyish out of it. “It’s bigger business than I could have expected for another five years. I’m sorry for the old man, though –
he’s
nervous, if you like. They can hardly keep him in bed. Isn’t that somebody beckoning to you?”

Elmore looked everywhere except in the right direction among the carts. If you had been “to the Collegiate,” relatives among the carts selling squashes were embarrassing.

“There,” his companion indicated.

“It’s mother,” replied Mr. Crow, with elaborate unconcern; “but I don’t suppose she’s in anything of a hurry. I’ll just go along with you far’s the post-office.” He kept his glance carefully from the spot at which he was signalled, and a hint of copper colour crawled up the back of his neck.

“Oh, but she is. Come along, Elmore; I can go that way.”

“It’ll be longer for you.”

“Not a bit.” Lorne cast a shrewd glance at his companion. “And as we’re passing you might just introduce me to your mother, see?”

“She won’t expect it, Lorne.”

“That’s all right, my son. She won’t refuse to meet a friend of yours.” He led the way as he spoke to the point of vantage occupied by Mrs. Crow, followed, with plain reluctance, by her son. She was a frail-looking old woman, with a knitted shawl pinned tightly across her chest, and her bonnet, in the course of commercial activity, pushed so far back as to be almost falling off.

“You might smarten yourself with that change, Elmore,” she addressed him, ignoring his companion. “There’s folks coming back for it. Two-dollar bill, wa’n’t it? Fifty cents – seventy-five – dollar’n a half. That’s a Yankee dime, an’ you kin march straight back with it. They don’t pass but for nine cents, as you’re old enough to know. Keep twenty-five cents for your dinner – you’ll get most for the money at the Barker House – an’ bring me back another quarter. Better go an’ get your victuals now – it’s gone twelve – while they’re hot.”

Elmore took his instructions without visible demur; and then, as Lorne had not seen fit to detach himself, performed the ceremony of introduction. As he performed it he drew one foot back and bowed himself, which seemed obscurely to facilitate it. The suspicion faded out of Mrs. Crow’s tired old sharp eyes under the formula, and she said she was pleased to make our friend’s acquaintance.

“Mr. Murchison’s changed some since the old days at the Collegiate,” Elmore explained, “but he ain’t any different under his coat. He’s practisin’ the law.”

“Lawyers,” Mrs. Crow observed, “are folks I like to keep away from.”

“Quite right, too,” responded Lorne, unabashed. “And so you’ve got my friend here back on the farm, Mrs. Crow?”

“Well, yes, he’s back on the farm, an’ when he’s wore out his Winnipeg clothes and his big ideas, we’re lookin’ to make him some use.” Mrs. Crow’s intention, though barbed, was humorous, and her son grinned broadly.

“There’s more money in the law,” he remarked, “once you get a start. Here’s Mr. Murchison goin’ to run the Ormiston case; his old man’s down sick, an’ I guess it depends on Lorne now whether Ormiston gets off or goes to penitentiary.”

Mrs. Crow’s face tied itself up into criticism as she looked our young man up and down. “Depends upon you, does it?” she commented. “Well, all I’ve got to say is it’s a mighty young dependence. Coming on next week, ain’t it? You won’t be much older by then. Yes’m,” she turned to business, “I don’t say but what it’s high for rhubarb, but there ain’t another bunch in the market, and won’t be for a week yet.”

Under cover of this discussion Lorne bade the Crows good morning, retreating in the rear of the lady who found the
rhubarb high. Mrs. Crow’s drop of acid combined with his saving sense of the humour of it to adjust all his courage and his confidence, and with a braver face than ever he involuntarily hastened his steps to keep pace with his happy chance.

I
n the wide stretches of a new country there is nothing to bound a local excitement, or to impede its transmission at full value. Elgin was a manufacturing town in southern Ontario, but they would have known every development of the Federal Bank case at the North Pole if there had been anybody there to learn. In Halifax they did know it, and in Vancouver, B.C., while every hundred miles nearer it warmed as a topic in proportion. In Montreal the papers gave it headlines; from Toronto they sent special reporters. Of course, it was most of all the opportunity of Mr. Horace Williams, of the
Elgin Express
, and of Rawlins, who held all the cards in their hands, and played them, it must be said, admirably, reducing the
Mercury
to all sorts of futile expedients to score, which the
Express
would invariably explode with a guffaw of contradiction the following day. It was to the
Express
that the Toronto reporters came for details and local colour; and Mr. Williams gave them just as much as he thought they ought to have and no more. It was the
Express
that managed, while elaborately abstaining from improper comment upon a matter
sub judice
, to feed and support the general conviction of young
Ormiston’s innocence, and thereby win for itself, though a “Grit” paper, wide reading in that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation, while the Conservative
Mercury
, with its reckless sympathy for an old party name, made itself criminally liable by reviewing cases of hard dealing by the bank among the farmers, and only escaped prosecution by the amplest retraction and the most contrite apology. As Mr. Williams remarked, there was no use in dwelling on the unpopularity of the bank,
that
didn’t need pointing out; folks down Moneida way could put any newspaper wise on the number of mortgages foreclosed and the rate for secondary loans exacted by the bank in those parts. That consideration, no doubt, human nature being what it is, contributed the active principle to the feeling so widely aroused by the case. We are not very readily the prey to emotions of faith in our fellows, especially, perhaps, if we live under conditions somewhat hard and narrow; the greater animosity behind is, at all events, valuable to give force and relief and staying power to a sentiment of generous conviction. But however we may depreciate its origin, the conviction was there, widespread in the townships; young Ormiston would “get clear;” the case for the defence might be heard over every bushel of oats in Elgin market-place.

In Elgin itself opinion was more reserved. There was a general view that these bank clerks were fast fellows, and a tendency to contrast the habits and the pay of such dashing young men; an exercise which ended in a not unnatural query. As to the irritating caste feeling maintained among them, young Ormiston perhaps gave himself as few airs as any. He was generally conceded indeed by the judging sex to be “nice to everybody;” but was not that exactly the nature for which temptations were most easily spread? The town, moreover, had a sapience of its own. Was it likely that the bank would
bring a case so publicly involving its character and management without knowing pretty well what it was about? The town would not be committed beyond the circle of young Ormiston’s intimate friends, which was naturally small if you compared it with the public; the town wasn’t going to be surprised at anything that might be proved. On the other hand, the town was much more vividly touched than the country by the accident which had made Lorne Murchison practically sole counsel for the defence, announced as it was by the
Express
with every appreciation of its dramatic value. Among what the
Express
called “the farming community” this, in so far as it had penetrated, was regarded as a simple misfortune, a dull blow to expectancy, which expectancy had some work to survive. Elgin, with its finer palate for sensation, saw in it heightened chances, both for Lorne and for the case; and if any ratepayer within its limits had remained indifferent to the suit, the fact that one side of it had been confided to so young and so “smart” a fellow townsman would have been bound to draw him into the circle of speculation. Youth in a young country is a symbol wearing all its value. It stands not only for what it is. The trick of augury invests it, at a glance, with the sum of its possibilities, the augurs all sincere, confident, and exulting. They have been justified so often; they know, in their wide fair fields of opportunity, just what qualities will produce what results. There is thus a complacence among adolescent peoples which is vaguely irritating to their elders; but the greybeards need not be over-captious; it is only a question of time, pathetically shortlived in the history of the race. San guine persons in Elgin were freely disposed to “bet on” Lorne Murchison, and there were none so despondent as to take the view that he would not come out of it, somehow, with an added personal significance. To make a spoon is a laudable
achievement, but it may be no mean business to spoil a horn.

As the
Express
put it, there was as little standing room for ladies and gentlemen in the courthouse the first day of the Spring Assizes as there was for horses in the Court House Square. The County Crown Attorney was unusually, oddly, reinforced by Cruickshank, of Toronto – the great Cruickshank, K.C., probably the most distinguished criminal lawyer in the Province. There were those who considered that Cruickshank should not have been brought down, that it argued undue influence on the part of the bank, and his retainer was a fierce fan to the feeling in Moneida; but there is no doubt that his appearance added all that was possible to the universal interest in the case. Henry Cruickshank was an able man, and, what was rarer, a fastidious politician. He had held office in the Dominion Cabinet, and had resigned it because of a difference with his colleagues in the application of a principle; they called him, after a British politician of lofty but abortive views, the Canadian Renfaire. He had that independence of personality, that intellectual candour, and that touch of magnetism which combine to make a man interesting in his public relations. Cruickshank’s name alone would have filled the courthouse, and people would have gone away quoting him.