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Title: Oliver Constable, miller and baker, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Author: Sarah Tytler
Release date: March 25, 2026 [eBook #78299]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1880
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78299
Credits: Matthew Sleadd and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLIVER CONSTABLE, MILLER AND BAKER, VOL. 1 (OF 3) ***
Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
VOL. I.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
MILLER AND BAKER
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOL. I.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1880
[_All rights reserved_]
_TO MARGARET_
MOTHER AND SISTER IN ONE: LOVING AND FAITHFUL FELLOW-WORKER WHOSE EAGER
INTEREST IN THIS STORY PROVED ITS AUTHOR’S GREATEST ENCOURAGEMENT IN
WRITING IT: WHOSE DEATH BEFORE THE STORY WAS FINISHED DARKENED LIFE AND
WORK TO ONE SOLITARY WORKER
_IN HOPE OF_
_THE TIMES OF RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS_
OXFORD: _17th April 1880_
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FRIARTON MILL 1
II. OLIVER CONSTABLE’S RETURN 23
III. OLIVER’S ANNOUNCEMENT 54
IV. A HOT ARGUMENT 86
V. A LAST APPEAL 112
VI. LOUISA AND CATHERINE HILLIARD 136
VII. HOW MRS. HILLIARD AND CATHERINE
JUDGED THE LAST ST. GEORGE OF
FRIARTON 167
VIII. OLIVER’S PROCLAMATION IN THE MILL AND
THE BAKEHOUSE 193
IX. THE NEW TENANTS OF COPLEY GRANGE
FARM 227
X. OLIVER’S NOTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP 274
OLIVER CONSTABLE,
_MILLER AND BAKER_.
CHAPTER I.
FRIARTON MILL.
OLD mills which were built to be worked by water power are mostly
picturesque objects in the landscape. They command without fail certain
advantages of situation. Certainly they are not likely to possess
extensive views, where they stand in the low lands which claim a fall
of water. But water is their specialty, and where there is water, there
is generally wood. My readers must call up without any difficulty
before their minds’ eyes pleasant pictures of such mills with their
placid dams and flashing weirs, their great mill wheels and their
noisy clappers, their dusty sacks and their equally dusty millers, so
proverbial for their white coats as to have lent a popular name to one
pollen sprinkled auriculus. Mill and water, wheel and man, are all set
in a green leafy nook which forms the broadest possible contrast to the
grey bare downs on which the windmill extends its giant arms and swings
its flapping sails. Picture and song have enshrined the old water mills
from the days when Constable the painter loved to represent on canvas
such a Suffolk mill as that which was familiar to his youth, to the
later days when Tennyson wrote his idyll of the Miller’s Daughter.
Of all mills which had their sites chosen with reference to water,
though the millers—not anticipating Mr. Ruskin’s objections—had long
before the present day, by the help of machinery, set seasons of
drought at defiance, none was more thoroughly picturesque in its own
line of picturesqueness, pleasanter to all the senses, more homelike,
restful and sweet, like a thrush’s nest or a tuft of primroses, than
Friarton Mill in Holmshire. It was so evidently agreeable to the
eye, and had attained to such an amount of fame for this desirable
quality, that it had been suffered to remain where it had been built
in primitive easy-going times, within a stone’s throw of the park of
Copley Grange, and in full view of the manor-house. In fact it had been
found that, after the fashion of those happy accidents which create
leaning towers and whispering galleries, and which can never be copied
with any certainty of success, the indifference to æsthetics which
had made the old squire of Copley Grange permit the miller of his day
to erect his mill at his liege lord’s elbow, had been oddly enough
rewarded by furnishing the Squire’s descendants or successors with
one of the choicest bits of what we may call landscape vertu—a home
lion which, as the modern squires were not needy men, and had further
acquired the modern culture of beauty to their finger tips, they would
not have lacked for a good many broad acres. If the reigning miller and
owner of Friarton Mill had been Vandal enough to propose to demolish
it—which he could have done since his fathers had bought it and certain
pasture fields of the original suzerain—he would have awakened the
liveliest consternation in the breasts of his social superiors.
The loss of Friarton Mill would have gone far to destroy the
picturesque charm of Copley Grange, with all its advantages of
wood and water. For, to the deep regret of its youngest sons and
daughters, their ancestor under the second George had taken it
upon him with no consideration for the tastes and feelings of
his great-great-grandchildren to pull down a gem of a rambling,
inconvenient, half-ruinous Elizabethan manor-house. And he had
replaced it with a distressingly heavy, square pile of masonry, in
which he and the architect had actually thought of little save of
expressing pompously their ideas of space and comfort. The little
which went beyond these prosaic requirements had borne the doubtful
fruit of an Italian portico. It had been voted elegant and classical
by the contemporaries of the unfortunate squire who was thus severely
reflected upon by his heirs. In a few more years it might rise again
into value. It might be prized as a proof of past style, of the
tendency of the day, serving as a key to the prevalence of fiddle brown
in artists’ work, and to the choice of subjects in Richard Wilson’s
paintings, or as an indication of something else equally interesting.
But in the present day, with which after all this generation has most
to do, it was regarded as an incongruous humbug.
The living representative of the family at Copley Grange had done
what he could to remedy the fatal error of his ancestor. He had
succeeded, when he came of age, to the savings of a long minority. He
was also the manager in chief of a large endowment which a pious and
charitable predecessor had bequeathed to support a Copley Grange row
of almshouses. By a most fortuitous circumstance, if not by a clear
interposition of Providence, as the young Squire was disposed to think,
this endowment had been legally disputed, and had remained in abeyance
till the lawyers picked as much flesh as they could off its bones, so
that the rearing of the fabric, which was to be emblematic to all time,
fell to a nineteenth-century man. He improved the circumstance. Instead
of building a set of ordinary red brick cottages with little cottage
kailyards, which might have fitly housed and afforded recreation to
twenty old Copley Grange labourers and their aged partners, he let in a
little light on the crass ignorance of the destroyer of the Elizabethan
manor-house, by building in the immediate vicinity of Copley Grange a
terrace of dainty little structures, all gables and mullioned windows,
and stacks of chimneys—with pleasure-grounds having thickets and lawns
to correspond, which took several experienced gardeners, told off for
the purpose, to keep them in order. Finally he built a tiny alms-house
chapel on the strictest principles of mediæval architecture. The
carving within and without, the painted glass, the frescoes, the Latin
texts which might have been Greek or Hebrew to the daily worshippers,
the peal of bells, supplied a boast to the county guide-book.
It is another question whether the poor old bodies, whose number was
now limited to eight, and whose taste could hardly be supposed to have
reached the stage at which that unlucky forefather of the Squire’s had
committed his solecism, did not feel far from home, aggrieved, and made
mountebanks of in their new quarters. The arrangements, which included
endless draughty corners, and troublesome, perilous steps up and steps
down, were purely perplexing and affronting to the occupants of the
almshouses. These pensioners were taken out of ugly houses on a level
with their capacities, and therefore more to their minds. The old men
and women, too old to learn, were elected according to the reigning
Squire and his wife’s will and pleasure, and somewhat with reference to
the worn out labourers’ venerable beards and their wives’ smooth silver
braids of hair, or to the couples’ reasonable disposition to avail
themselves of blackthorn sticks and silver-rimmed spectacles, as well
as to their general good behaviour, and what might be reckoned upon in
the matter of their punctual and decorous attendance at the chaplain’s
daily services.
Naturally, perhaps, the recipients of the Squire’s bounty were not
particularly grateful for the manner of its bestowal. They were too
practical and hard pressed to refuse a refuge which after all was
far before the poor-house. But old Mrs. Scud expressed boldly the
secret sentiments of six out of the eight women when she declared she
‘wished Squire’s lady would try a day’s washing herself, and see if she
would like it, in a nasty cold common wash-house which anybody might
halve and quarter, and who wanted that imperent, pushing Mrs. Webb,
or sly Anne Sole, to come in and take a invitory of their old men’s
wussen shirts, and their own darnedest stockings, when they had been
accustomed to wash nice and comfortable in private on their own warm
hearth-stone where nobody could come and spy, without the missus of the
house’s leave? Ah! she were missus of her house in them days, and not
bound to say her prayers at the gentlefolks’ pleasure. What good could
that do to her poor old soul, she would like to know? It “might lend a
lift” to her betters’ souls, since they were always in luck, but forced
prayers never did no good to them as said them, that she would take her
Bible oath on.’
And old Mr. Fry (the members of the stranded colony were each strictly
Mr. and Mrs. among themselves, unless in the case of a miserable
spinster who had missed her mark, like Anne Sole) daringly defined the
opinions of his brethren when he protested he would give all ‘them
fandangles of shrubberies and grass that were of no good save to the
screeching birds of the air as he was not allowed to put a finger on,
for his old cabbage bed, where, as everybody knew, he had riz the
whitest-hearted cabbages in the parish, not to say for his pig-stye,
where, when he could do a double day’s work, and was well-to-do—never
thinking what he would come to—as some there could bear him witness, he
had fed prime pigs as were a pleasure to look at.
So it became another question whether the owner of Copley Grange had
altogether fulfilled the intention—always supposing it to have been
kindly and not ostentatious or selfish in disguise—of his forerunner,
as he was fully persuaded he had done, while he fumed over the
thanklessness and discontent of the poor, or whether he had served
himself and ridden his hobby to the death, by way of loving his
neighbour.
When all was done, the Copley Grange Almshouses were only a modern
antique, and the Squire had too much taste not to prefer the real
antique of Friarton Mill, which was not his property, indeed, but was
set down within a stone’s throw of his grounds. As he took care to keep
on the best terms with the miller, the Squire flattered himself, it was
as safe almost, as though it were in his own hands. He was at liberty
to take his guests over it at all hours, in the course of the shortest
of strolls, and he had so managed a vista of old thorn trees that the
mill formed the loveliest vignette from the grand drawing-room windows.
There was no inscription on the building, and there is no existing
architecture which could decide the date when Friarton Mill was built.
Popular tradition, which always tends to the age of good Queen Bess,
as if it had been golden and not iron in English annals, loosely
attributed that date to the mill. Undoubtedly, it was so old that even
its unsophisticated millers had grown proud and careful of its age,
as a man who will ignore and trample upon his years at sixty, nay, at
threescore and ten, will boast of them, and cherish them tenderly from
eighty upwards. Everything about the mill, except the iron machinery
which was kept out of sight, was white powdered or silvery grey, or
rich brown, or toned in sage or olive green, dull crimson, and dusky
orange by stonecrops and lichens, as no art-school design could tone
colours. The building stood as near the water as an old Venetian palace
is to its canal. The site must have been untenable in an English
climate to any miller who was not proof against the chest complaints
and rheumatisms that English flesh is heir to, had not the water which
in floods lapped the mill walls been the flow just below the weir. It
was always rapid in its current, thus carrying off a large proportion
of its own vapour, never stagnated in pools, nor, even when there
was least water, dried up in portions of its channel, throwing off
unwholesome miasma in the process. Another protection to the miller
and his family was, that his two-storied, stone-roofed, dwelling
house, built at right angles to the mill, stood by the whole breadth
of its court back from the water where the ground rose, and a natural
drainage filtered away the damp in the soil. Actual evidence removed
all reproach of slimy or mildewed unwholesomeness from Friarton Mill,
or, for that matter, from the mansion-house of Copley Grange, which
stood only a little farther from what was still called ‘the Brook,’ or
‘Buller’s Brook.’ No races of men or women in the parish had been, in
the memory of the oldest Friarton man (and he was to be found in the
Copley Grange Almshouses), stronger and longer-lived, in the main, than
the two families which had for generations dwelt in the mill and the
manor-house.
On the face of the mill, as it fronted the water, opening from the
second story, was a curiously carved wooden gallery, such as one meets
with in Nüremberg and some of the older German towns. It had been
intended originally to hold sacks of corn or flour, which were hoisted
up or lowered down by a crane from, or to, the narrow road-way—only
broad enough at the widest to hold a single farm cart with its
horses—that interposed between the mill and the water. The gallery had
become obsolete for this purpose, having been superseded by other and
ampler contrivances on the other side of the mill; and a great willow
tree had been allowed to grow up and still farther impede the road-way,
which it narrowed to a footpath, as it spread out its roots, and flung
across its higher branches until they drooped over the water. But the
respect which had been developed for every sign of the mill’s antiquity
not only saved the gallery from destruction, but, in order to keep up
its character, caused it to be occasionally used still, as a place of
deposit for floury sacks. It was more frequently employed as a point
of vantage which the miller could appropriate—a place for smoking his
pipe and staring at the water beneath his feet; where the gentle folks
from Copley could come and loiter and gaze abroad into the recesses of
Copley Grange Park, which was only divided from the mill by the Brook
and a sunk fence.
The park was by no means large, but the ground was undulating, and,
furnished with patches of bracken, old thorns, brakes of hazel and
blackberry, and some magnificent oaks and beeches, it formed of itself
dells and dingles, which had the appearance of stretching far and wide.
At two seasons of the year the view from the gallery of Friarton
Mill which did not extend beyond the park, and had the objection, if
you will, of being shut in, ‘tame and domestic,’ formed at the same
time a nearly perfect bit of woodland, while the well ‘seasoned’
Georgian house, with the Italian façade in the foreground, stopped
short of being an eyesore. In late spring, when the tender green of
the beech and oak contrasted with the sombre green of the fir, and
was relieved by the white blossoms of the wild crab and pear trees;
when the gnarled hawthorn bushes, in the dim light of early morning
or late twilight, stood crowned like ‘aged men,’ or in the glory of
noon bent like veiled brides; when clusters of red May and the spikes
of the red-flowered chestnut—introduced to compete with the native
trees—lent a half tropical brilliance to the sweet English purity of
the colouring; when the turf below was here and there pale gold with
primroses or misty blue with hyacinths; when blackbirds and thrushes
sang openly and unblushingly to their mates on every spray, and the
cuckoo’s note and the ringdove’s call sounded from hidden hollows; when
the first nightingale made night tuneful and poured out his passion
till it rose in liquid clearness above the monotonous rush and tinkle
of the waters, then Copley Grange Park, and Friarton Mill were at
their second best. For the autumn suited them even better than the
spring, nothing could surpass the exquisite rich mellowness and tender
delicacy when the ripe brown chestnut was dropping from its husk on
the water-of-Nile coloured grass, in the chillness of October; when
the five fingers of the chestnut leaves and the vine leaf of the maple
were burning in maize colour; when the oak was russet, the beech and
wild cherry crimson darkening into purple or streaked with scarlet;
the birch and the elm straw and daffodil colour; when the bracken was
rusty; when only the trill of the robin and the distant bark of a
dog broke the stillness of the earth resting from its labours with a
curtain of haze falling between it and the dappled sky.
But in winter also, when Buller’s Brook was hanging with icicles, and
‘roaring and reaming’ after it had broken its frozen bounds, and the
grass was sere, and the boughs of the trees stood out bare and black,
unless where the sunlight caught those near at hand, and brought out
their furry greys, and the blue bloom of a plum, hovering about the
twigs and bourgeons; or when they were feathered with hoar frost or
panoplied with snow, standing out in dead cold masses against the
leaden grey of the clouds—the park, as seen from the mill gallery,
was not to be despised by any hardy sight-seer who could face with
fortitude benumbed toes and tingling fingers.
The court before the mill-house had its own tree, a round-headed
bushy mulberry tree, while the house itself was covered with several
old-fashioned rose bushes, including a monthly rose which did not
wait for June, but sent out its china pink buds early in May, and
went on obligingly, supplying large instalments of various shades of
magenta-coloured, faintly smelling roses, from month to month, till
November, if the winter were not a hard one. The other roses, noisette
and a crimson—acquiring a duller purple tinge, perhaps the nearest
approach to ‘blue roses’ in fading—adhered strictly to June and
July for flowering in one blow, but they made up as much as possible
for their unbending character in this respect by pouring forth, when
they did blossom, a prodigal wealth of roses, which in their turn
discharged a perfect avalanche of crumbled petals into the court and
on the breast of the brook, that ran, for days at a time, pied like
a daisy, impartially divided into the colours of York and Lancaster,
as other rivers have run yellow with gold or red with blood. One side
of the house would show sumptuous crimson without a green leaf for a
whole fortnight, when it was not a rainy summer; and as for the ivory
white noisette roses, the half-blown buds and flowers on a branch could
be counted by the fifty, and a single cluster would fill one of Fan
Constable’s crazy, tottering flower-glasses.
At one time the older of these rose trees, with the ‘mulberry-bush,’
as it was called, had served for a flower-garden to the mill-house, as
the bough of a tree or a few stones on the stage used to stand for a
forest or a rocky pass. Then the dwellers in the mill-house became less
primitive in their notions, and not so easily satisfied. The miller’s
wife had her border round her court with daffodils and carnations,
sweet-williams and sunflowers in their order, until at last the border
merged into a walled garden, which, in addition to its apricot-trees
and its early peas and potatoes, had its dahlia and salvia beds, and
its frames for raising geraniums and verbenas, all of them not so far
behind the terraces and green-houses at Copley Grange.
But full of living beauty as Friarton Mill and Copley Grange were,
their owners did not escape the curse of humanity, and the dead were
lying at the same time both in the mill-house and the grange. Old Peter
Constable had paid his last debt, and been gathered to his fathers—full
of days and of such honours as an honest, active useful life cannot
fail to gather; and the Squire’s wife had inherited so little strength
that she had died, worn out with sustaining the dignity and refinement
of her station and with bearing three children, before she had attained
her twenty-fifth year.
CHAPTER II.
OLIVER CONSTABLE’S RETURN.
FAN CONSTABLE was in the drawing-room of the mill-house, awaiting the
return of her brother from his last term at Oxford. A mill-house may
have its drawing-room, and its son may have been at Oxford, and that
not in the old capacity of a servitor, in the experience of modern
England.
Old Peter Constable, who had inherited from his father not only
Friarton Mill and its meadows, but the chief baking business in the
town of Friarton, had possessed other flour mills also, and had died a
well-to-do man. He might have gone a little way off and kept a much
more pretentious establishment than that of Friarton Mill, without
being guilty of extravagant housekeeping for his means. But he was
neither ashamed of his origin nor of his business; he was unassuming
in his nature, and he was almost as proud of the old place with an
instinctive unquestioning fondness, as his neighbour the Squire adored
it on the last principles of taste.
The miller and baker’s only son had distinguished himself as a boy in
his classes at Friarton Grammar School—which was rather famous among
grammar schools, and, having acquired a good name for sending up lads
who took scholarships, and became in due time fellows and tutors of
Oxford colleges, was eager to keep up its reputation, and, by the
mouths of its masters, egged on promising pupils to go in for the
prizes of learning. The case of Oliver Constable formed no exception.
It seemed as if he were only fulfilling his part of the obligation,
when, after having been head boy at Friarton, he went up to Oxford
and immediately vindicated the propriety of the step by gaining a
scholarship—though indeed his father was sufficiently well off to make
no objection to paying his son’s college terms in full.
Old Peter Constable continued to have no scruple on the point of
maintaining his son at Oxford, because at the end of Oliver’s first
term there occurred a passage between the father and son which may
sound incredible, but which actually had a precedent, that appeared
in print in the life of a Scotch earl and his heir. The miller, like
the old Earl of Elgin, feeling highly gratified by his boy’s success,
thought to reward it by sending him as big a cheque as the elder man
felt justified in giving over and above the younger man’s income,
bidding him spend that in any manner which might please him best.
And the young miller, like the young earl, returned the cheque with
a grateful acknowledgment of the kindness of the intention, and an
announcement that he had no use for the money; he was amply provided
with the sinews of war already; he would rather the sum were spent in
procuring some special pleasure for the father, who was frugal and
self-denying in his personal habits, or for the sister Fan, who, being
a girl—and an only and motherless girl—needed particular indulgence.
It remained to be proved whether the young miller would follow up his
extraordinary moderation by a career in any respect parallel to that of
the patriotic statesman.
But in spite of Peter Constable’s pride and confidence in his son
from the beginning, it had not been without a certain ruefulness that
the man had consented to the single lad of the Constables’ household
forsaking the old path, which in Peter’s eyes was the safest and
pleasantest in the world, and which had been trodden smooth—as it
were, sprinkled white—for young Oliver by his father, grandfather,
and great-grandfather. The Constables were not of a rank to go beyond
a great-grandfather, but there had been at least three generations of
them in Friarton Mill and Friarton bakehouse, and mill and bakehouse
had flourished under the Constables’ rule, and had been known far
and wide for as unadulterated, well-ground flour, and as honestly
kneaded bread as could be expected from fallible men. The staff of
life, preserved as nearly as possible intact, had proved a boon to the
community, while the community in its turn had rewarded its faithful
servants by becoming their steady patrons.
Of course the mill and the bakehouse must pass away from the family if
Oliver developed into a scholar and gentleman, unless, to be sure, Fan
married a miller and baker, which did not seem likely. On the whole,
fully sensible as Peter felt that Oliver was a credit and even an
honour to his people, the miller would a good deal rather that his son
had remained in his own rank of life, and taken over from his failing
hands the old mill, which was the next thing to ‘parent, child and
wife’ in its owner’s estimation.
Events had not so shaped themselves, while Peter Constable was modest,
just, even generous. He would not set up his judgment against the
combined opinions of those who ought to know better—the learned masters
and parsons of Friarton Grammar School. Old Peter would not let his
prepossessions and prejudices stand in the way of Oliver’s rise in
life, if Oliver chose to rise; though to Peter’s mind such an ascent
was very often neither a comfortable nor a creditable process. He would
not constrain the lad to sacrifice an ambition which, with his gifts,
might be natural and proper in him, in order to maintain old landmarks.
As for Oliver, he responded plastically to the promptings of his
early teachers. He was keen on colleges and college-learning with
all the power and delight which those ideas then involved for him.
And the child Fan was even more enthusiastic than her brother on the
associations and attainments he was entering upon. She set herself
with the pertinacity and absence of reasonable calculation of a woman,
from the day Oliver left for college, to qualify herself for being, at
no distant day, the worthy sister and fit companion of a great don—a
dignitary high up in the Church, or an honoured judge.
So Peter tried also to accommodate himself to the will of Providence
and the force of circumstances. He was too old, indeed, to begin a
course of training in order to figure suitably as the father of one
of the magnates whose laurels were so quickly and easily won—in Fan’s
imagination. He knew full well, that though his boy as yet was the same
to him, and came home in the long vacation, rather to Fan’s disgust,
unforgetful of and undisgusted with a single homely detail of the old
life, though Oliver was, as he had ever been, perfectly natural and
unaffected, and would lend a hand to make up accounts and to help his
father with the management of the large business and many servants
in every way in the young man’s power, still in the course of time
Oliver’s widely different occupations must separate father and son.
Even already, in the midst of the son’s staunchness to first ties,
the father recognised with a curious mixture of fatherly pride and
sharp twinges of pain, in spite of his fatherly unselfishness, the
certain consequences of Oliver’s withdrawal from handicraft or trade
and absorption in the pursuit of learning, and in the companionship of
the class with regard to which Peter, in spite of his sagacity, fully
believed the pursuit of learning was the regular business of the
members’ lives, unless when they took a little bodily recreation in
the form of cricket, or boating, or sport. Oliver might be as humble
and hearty as he liked, but he was growing in the very tone of his
voice, and carriage of his head, and movement of his hand, more and
more of a gentleman, like the Squire and his friends. The boy could
not help himself; it was to his credit that he should, like good wood,
take on polish so rapidly. But though he would never turn his back on
his father, the men would gradually grow strange and shy as companions
to each other. All the more reason, Peter thought bravely and
disinterestedly, for him to make matters as smooth and easy to Oliver
when he should come after him, his father, as the old miller could
contrive. There were certain things which he, Peter, could still do
better than his clever, cultivated son, and it was some indemnification
to Peter for his own loss to do them for Oliver.
Peter sold advantageously the leases of the mills he had taken on in
addition to Friarton, and laid up the purchase-money in the funds,
where it would be no trouble, but a decided boon, to a gentleman and
scholar, as well as to Fan. Peter was on terms for the sale of the
baking business, but he could not find it in his heart to dispose of
Friarton Mill, though he knew he should always find a ready buyer in
the squire of Copley Grange, who would willingly suffer Peter to stay
on as tenant in the place for the rest of his life. But the miller
fancied Oliver might care to retain the mill, letting it to a tenant
who should reserve quarters for the landlord if ever he liked to
revisit the mill-house.
Death stepped in and settled all the arrangements before Peter had
come to an end of his plans for his son’s greater ease and well-being.
The miller died peacefully with Oliver sharing Fan’s watch by their
father’s pillow, raising, for an interval of relief on the broad young
breast, the bowed shoulders on which the young man, as a child, had so
often ridden triumphantly, and receiving reverently and tenderly the
last fluttering sigh.
In those first days of mourning little had been said of Oliver’s future
line of life, which had still remained so far undecided at the time
of his father’s death. As a matter of course, Oliver had returned to
Oxford to finish his term and take his degree, which he did with all
the _éclat_ that had been expected from him, winning a first class,
and immediately afterwards returning to Friarton Mill—his first return
since his father’s death—with Fan awaiting him to do what she could to
make up for the absence of another face and voice by lavishing upon her
brother her unbounded congratulations.
It was the month of June, one of the two seasons when Friarton Mill was
the nearest to an Arcadia. Enough of time had passed for Fan Constable
to be comforted for her old father’s death. She was able to hail her
brother’s arrival on the heels of his achievement, with all it implied
to her, in a spirit of exalted approbation. She was anxious to do him
all the honour in her power, and she displayed her anxiety according to
her instincts and training.
It was the fashion in Friarton to say that Fan Constable was a
worldly-minded as well as an unjustifiably proud and assuming young
woman. But Fan expressed herself on this occasion in a sufficiently
simple manner. She conned a cookery book, and tormented the miller’s
old housekeeper to cook a dinner, which Sally Pope said might have
been another funeral or wedding feast; and farther exasperated Sally
by bidding her serve it at a late hour. In the meantime Fan repaired
with all her belongings to the drawing-room, which had not been her
ordinary sitting-room. She had previously dressed herself in her best
gown of dim black silk and crape, with its sweeping train, and she now
sat down to look out for Oliver with an impatiently throbbing heart.
That drawing-room had been inaugurated by Fan, and yet it did not
reflect her character in the slightest degree. It was a singularly
colourless, pointless room, and Fan’s was not a colourless or pointless
nature. Fan’s taste had been just so far educated as to have reached
the chill circle of negation. She was able to reject with aversion
the stuffy crowd of incongruous, inconsequent tables and chairs, the
tawdry or glaring vulgarity of ornament in the houses of the wealthier
tradespeople, and even of the condescending professional people of
Friarton, with whom her visiting-list began and ended. Therefore
there was none of the embarrassment of more than doubtful riches apt
to distinguish third- or fourth-rate drawing-rooms in the room at
Friarton Mill. There were no Berlin wool or bead monstrosities, no
‘table books’ overpoweringly gorgeous, like the Queen’s Lifeguards,
in scarlet and gold bindings; no terrible specimens of art in
water-colours or chalks, no china chimney vases painted coarsely in
all the colours of the rainbow, and reckoned very handsome jars by
their complacent possessors; no starched tangles of white cotton,
crackling at every touch, on the backs of chairs and sofas, or on the
faces of little tables, attaching themselves without permission to the
collars of coats and the sleeves of gowns. Fan knew better than these
attributes of half civilisation went, but her knowledge stopped short
there, and only served to reveal her remaining amount of ignorance.
And she was so afraid of compromising herself in her ignorance that
she restricted herself as severely in her drawing-room as though
she had been a social Puritan: she ventured on little or nothing
beyond the absolutely necessary rosewood tables and cane seats of the
simplest form, the carpet and hangings of the most subdued tint and
pattern, the plain cottage piano with its heap of music, not in admired
disorder, but in deliberate tidiness in the background,—the attenuated
flower-glasses which would only hold the most attenuated bouquets. The
one error which Fan had allowed herself to fall into, was still on the
side of colourlessness and coldness. There was a large mirror over the
plain white marble chimney-piece which reflected and intensified with a
stony, topographical correctness the dim, meagre effect of the room.
There could not have been a wider contrast between the interior and
the world without, to which the room ought to have had an affinity,
between the natural homeliness and affluence of sweet beauty and gaiety
in the Friarton Mill surroundings, and the artificial vow of perpetual
frigidity and austerity—according to which Fan’s drawing-room was
arranged.
‘That drawing-room of Fan Constable’s is another version of the glacial
theory,’ Mrs. Hilliard, the most privileged and liveliest woman in
Friarton, used to declare, with a shrug of her shoulders and a real
shiver. ‘It is the bondage to starvation of rising gentility.’
Fan was perfectly conscious of a deficiency, while she would rather lay
herself open to a charge of something lacking in her room, than to the
countercharge of false adornment. But she was not sensible that the
chief and unpardonable defect was the absence of all trace of human joy
or sorrow, all touch of human character and token of individual bent,
which might have redeemed the barest room; and that it was the sense of
uneasiness and uncertainty, of doubting and halting on the threshold
of a new order of existence which rendered the atmosphere of this
room repellant as well as cold. Mrs. Hilliard was speaking a certain
amount of nonsense when she added that Fan’s room contained the last
drawing-room suite advertised by Maple or Shoolbred, weeded to death,
since neither Maple—nor Morris himself—could have adequately supplied
the fatal weakness of that room.
But Fan’s own presence did something to enrich it. Fan in her sweeping
mourning was a small, fine-featured, keen-eyed, dark-haired, restless
little woman, whose temperament was the reverse of lymphatic, who had
none of the facile, mindless, heartless sweetness that would have added
the last mawkish offence to the other offences. How a creature like Fan
could exist even for an hour at a time in such a domestic desert, how
she could fail to impress on it some token of her ardent identity, only
proved the strong self-restraint, the determination of purpose of which
the girl was capable.
Fan was idle this afternoon as she was rarely idle, since her
energy, like that of Michael the Wizard’s little fiends, demanded a
constant field for its operation; and as she was inclined to treat
with withering contempt all the poor little girlish fancy-work which
had ever come under her notice, she was notable, for her years, in
household management, and practical in feminine wisdom. Fan could have
kept the house, and regulated and overlooked the _ménage_ very nearly
as well as Sally Pope—in fact she did so when Sally would let her—and
this is no small testimony to Fan’s talents, for old Sally Pope was
an experienced and efficient, if conceited, housekeeper and cook. Not
a girl in Friarton, not one of the well-born vicar’s daughters, who
had each received an excellent education, seen something of the great
world, was clever in her own way, and knew herself compelled to make
the most of her allowance for dress and minor expenses, could spend
that allowance more judiciously in every respect than Fan Constable—who
might have been supposed to revel in rude abundance—could dispose of
her private income. Not a girl, hardly a matron in the parish, was so
available for choir-practising, school teaching, managing the details
of charitable clubs as Fan Constable had already proved herself,—facts
which the vicar’s wife, and the mistress of Copley Grange, when she was
alive, knew right well.
Fan acted more from general good principles, and, perhaps, in some
measure, unconsciously from policy, than from a purely benevolent
temper. Yet at the most unexpected seasons, and in circumstances which
were not so much out of the common as to warrant an exception to the
rule, Fan Constable would suddenly amaze and overcome her coadjutors
by a burst of womanly tenderness, deep, wistful and self-accusing,
perfectly irresistible in such a woman.
It was by dint of her early strength of will, and of something sterling
in her earnestness even when the game did not seem worth the candle,
quite as much as on account of her father’s purse and a credulous
faith in her brother’s genius—with the future honour which it might
reflect on Friarton, that Fan had been lifted over the heads of her
compeers and promoted to a somewhat difficult footing, for which it
is needless to say that she had to bear much obloquy, in a rank of
society considerably above what was the original sphere of the owners
of Friarton Mill.
Fan could not work on the eve of what she was firmly persuaded must be
one of the great crises of her life. Oliver was coming home crowned
with the only laurels he could have gathered; and Fan had the entire
sympathy with the gathering which belonged to the consciousness that
she too was capable of enterprise and application, though not in
securing such triumphs as Oliver had won. Fan knew perfectly that she
was not clever in one sense; she was even slow where book-learning was
concerned. Of course, she had by perseverance mastered the obstacles
which had lain in the way of her becoming a fairly well-educated girl,
after her father had been induced to send her to good schools both
at home and abroad; and she had striven hard to cultivate her mind
and taste still farther, so as to become a tolerable companion for
Oliver—one of whom he need not be ashamed when educated men and refined
women were his daily associates.
Still the truth remained that Fan was not intellectual—like Catherine
Hilliard at the Meadows, or Lucy Houghton, the vicar’s eldest daughter,
who might have made some pretence to enact ‘sweet girl-graduates.’
None could be better aware of what she lacked in this respect than
Fan, who had even an inordinate value for the attainments in which
she failed—who felt only the more called upon, with a half-pathetic
meekness and humility in the middle of her pride and high spirit, to
support Oliver’s dignity by the sedulous exercise of the faculties
Providence had given her. She believed she was ladylike, she knew she
was sensible, she felt none could be more deeply attached to Oliver
and his interests. She was prepared to prove an excellent mistress of
his establishment and manager of his household expenses, so long as he
needed her. What was still stronger evidence of her devotion, she was
prepared to vacate the post she craved, for the consummation of her
wishes, on a suitable marriage on Oliver’s part. Of course Oliver ought
to marry and marry well, which would be a help to his social position.
Then her services would no longer be required, and—well, she might
possibly marry in her turn.
Oliver was coming home to Friarton Mill, but there was little
likelihood that he would stay there. He might already have formed his
plans—whatever they were Fan was ready to give in her adherence to
them. She had no desire to remain at Friarton Mill; she had, on the
contrary, a great inclination to get away from all that hampered her
and would hamper her brother. She was a woman of strong and faithful
family affections, but she was as nearly as possible without local
attachments. She had a feeling for beauty—rather in form than in
colour, but she was not possessed with the admiration which Friarton
Mill frequently called forth. She rather resented its ardent expression
to her, as some Scotchmen resent the enthusiasm many foreigners
entertain for them in the light of the countrymen of Robert Burns and
Sir Walter Scott.
She did not at all approve of the shape the furor took; and she kept
herself out of the way of those visitors from Copley Grange, who, in
spite of the hints of the Squire, were too stolid in their superior
rank to understand that Fan was not the typical miller’s daughter and
were fain to patronise her under an altogether erroneous impression.
Such gratuitous patronage would fill Fan with an intensity of
indignation and affront so far beyond what the offence deserved, that
the wrath became ludicrous in its anti-climax. It was the new order of
things, it was the coming dignity, it was Oliver the chief bestower of
the dignity, that were all affably patronised in the person of Fan, and
Fan had to be angry for the whole.
At last Oliver turned into the court, walking and carrying his bag from
the station as usual—‘as if nothing had happened,’ Fan exclaimed to
herself, with a quick shade of vexation, while she ran downstairs to
welcome him on the threshold.
There was little family likeness between the brother and sister, as
there were few points in unison in their characters, beyond what
existed in their uprightness and the depth of regard between the
two—who, so far as near kindred was concerned, stood alone in the world
and were all in all to each other. Certainly Oliver was spare as Fan
was slight, and there was a little of a worn look about the young man’s
thin face, which testified to the work of nervous energy there also.
But he was big and Fan was little. His hair was brown, straight, and
already thin. Hers was black, wavy and luxuriant. He had a ruddy tinge
in the brown of his complexion which no burning of the midnight oil—and
he had burned it in his time with a young man’s superb recklessness—had
served to rout. Fan’s complexion was the clear paleness often found in
a brunette.
But the greatest contrast in Oliver and Fan Constable’s features was
found in the eyes, though in both brother and sister these were brown.
Fan’s had the hazel tint and the keen observation combined with the
shyness of a pheasant or a partridge’s eye. Oliver’s eyes were darker
in hue, and though they were not without repressed fire, had much of
the brooding reflectiveness—verging on doggedness—of the ox’s eye.
Oliver Constable was firmly knit, and ought to have carried himself as
easily, and with as natural a grace, in his broad-shouldered height, as
Fan did in her low stature. But the peculiar neatness and daintiness of
personal belongings which constituted not only a crowning distinction
but a ruling passion in Fan, so that slovenliness and disorder caused
her absolute pain, were wholly absent in her brother’s case. There
could not have been the remotest chance, even supposing he had been
a short instead of a tall man, of his worst enemies calling Oliver
‘dapper’ or ‘smug,’ as some of Fan’s ‘dear friends’ chose to term her
‘natty’ or ‘trim.’
But although Oliver wore the grey morning suit which has replaced the
‘purple’ in connection with the ‘fine linen’ in the dress of a Dives
or a duke, which is at once perfectly unassuming and perfectly good of
its kind, the miller’s son and heir suffered from an innate, incurable
personal negligence, such as besets some men in all ranks and in all
nations—only the defect in an Englishman belonging to one of the upper
classes is free from the repulsive element of uncleanliness which is
apt to attend on the Bohemian negligence of a foreigner.
Fan was chronically distressed by this flaw of negligence in Oliver’s
idiosyncrasy. She had made a searching analysis to discover its origin,
in the course of vigorous attempts to overcome the weakness, but she
had been no more able to reach its root than she had succeeded in
shaking its influence for a day. It was not that Oliver was so ill-made
that his coats and trousers would not sit properly on his figure, for
he was really a handsome man if he could have done himself justice. It
was not that the habits of a gentleman did not come naturally to him,
and had not been long practised by him. For that matter their father,
who had never aspired to be more than his father had been before him,
had shown himself a tidy old martinet in his ways—just as she, Fan,
could not bear a pin out of its place, long before she was subjected to
school training. Yet here was Oliver, who had enjoyed every advantage
since he was a mere lad, who was, as Fan owned willingly, more
fastidious than herself in all essentials of manly and womanly good
breeding, in non-essentials a picture of helpless, hopeless disorder
from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; with the shifting
hat or cap on the drifting clouds of brown hair which no close clipping
of barber could keep a week in its place; with his crumpled collar,
his loosened, twisted necktie, his eccentric cuffs—one of which would
disappear up his coat-sleeve, while the other would out-herod fashion
by hanging not merely over his knuckles, but nearly to the tips of his
fingers. The last offence was in his boots, which, let Oliver buy them
from the prince of honest and accomplished boot-makers, in the course
of a week or two, took to disreputable curling up at the toes and going
down at the heels, with an air of being hard upon the parting of upper
leather and sole, and of affording an irresistible attraction to mud
and dust, like the sorriest hob-nailed shoes of any day labourer.
All this in a young, handsome, college-bred man would have been
unpardonable if there had been any cure for it; but Fan in her despair
was profoundly conscious there was none. She might call Oliver to
account every hour of the day, as a mother who is a disciplinarian may
lecture a careless hoyden among her daughters. Oliver would take her
remonstrance in perfect good humour, but he would not be a bit the
better for it. She might quote for his benefit with cutting sarcasm
the old tripping compliment to the very wildness of _abandon_ in
woman’s dress——
‘Hair loosely flowing, dress as free;
Simplicity more taketh me,—’
and ask him if he thought that applied as well to a man’s toilet?
Oliver would laugh and put up his hand, with a sense of guilt, to his
dishevelled moustache, then let it travel further to the Ricquet-like
tufts of his hair. He would look down with too tranquil deprecation at
the handkerchief dangling by one end from his pocket. But though hair
and handkerchief were remedied for the moment, they would be in a worse
condition twenty times before the day was done.
Oliver was also spasmodically awkward in his gestures, a peculiarity
sufficiently noticeable in a well-made man who had taken his share of
muscular exercise and learnt the noble art of self-defence.
Fan’s consolation was that Oliver, though the reverse of a puppy or
even alas! of an Adonis, was still unmistakably a gentleman in his most
extraordinary _gaucheries_; and when he was roused and in earnest, his
passion and determination mastered his mixture of indifference and
nervousness, until the bodily movements responded to the spirit within,
and acquired a certain untrammelled dignity and power.
CHAPTER III.
OLIVER’S ANNOUNCEMENT.
THE brother and sister met with the ‘Here I am, Fan,’ and the ‘So
you’ve got home, Oliver,’ of the thoroughly English brother and
sister, who, however cordially attached and however much they may
have to say to each other on particular occasions, rarely exceed such
words—accompanying the grasp of the hand, and the kiss on the cheek,
even on meeting after months of separation. Effusive speech and lavish
caresses are not for the true representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Oliver, in writing to his sister, when his name was in the prize list,
had so far forgotten his origin as to let his pen slip into the short
regretful sentence, ‘He would have been pleased that I had not missed
the mark.’ But even on paper he did not further specify the tie, and
now Oliver gave no sign of remembrance, that it was the first time he
had come home and failed to receive his father’s greeting. For the
old man was yet alive, though on his death-bed eagerly watching for
his son, when Oliver obeyed the summons which had last brought him to
Friarton Mill. It did not follow by any means that Oliver forgot the
past, though he remained dumb as he followed Fan to her room.
‘Do you sit here now, Fan?’ he asked his sister with a little surprise,
and an involuntary tone of disappointment. But even as he spoke, he
began to reproach himself privately for the question—so like a man’s
blundering to put it, within the first moment of his arrival too. To
be sure poor Fan still found the old sitting-room too full of sad
memories to be encountered without an effort. How could he, even in
imagination, have condemned a girl to sit alone where the old family
circle had been formed, with a dreary sense of a blank never to be
filled up, in one corner, and in one chair, constantly present to her
mind? It mattered little what room they occupied just then, and only a
stupid, thoughtless fellow would have drawn attention to the change,
thus carelessly probing the wound.
Oliver hastily directed the conversation to something else, without
waiting for an answer to his question, and in doing so accepted the
new domestic arrangement without protest—all the same his thoughts had
been dwelling vaguely but persistently throughout his railway journey
on the familiar low-browed room. The local attachments, which did not
exist for Fan, approached to a passion in Oliver’s nature. He had
seen, without trying to see them, his father’s big chair and ponderous
writing-desk, opposite which Fan’s little table and work-basket used
to stand. He had contemplated idly and half absently as if he had been
on the spot, the high wooden chimney-piece painted grey, and having
in relief, only in stucco unfortunately, clusters of wheat ears—as
if the chimney-piece had been designed expressly for a miller and
baker’s hearth—the corner cupboards, the odd nondescript article of
furniture in old mahogany which was neither side-board nor side-table,
nor cabinet, but which had the handiest shelves, the roomiest drawers
conceivable. At this season the purplish red roses were budding in such
profusion round the windows of the old parlour, that if a high wind
came when the roses were in full bloom, their petals would—as Oliver
had seen them before—be stripped off, and swept in a stream on the
faded worsted moss of the carpet as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa.
There were seats in the windows on which Oliver had often gathered
up his long legs and disposed of his arms in an attitude the most
excruciating to the eye of the spectator, yet the most restful to the
body of the performer. Oliver had been addicted, from boyhood, to
employing these low window ledges as convenient steps to the court, a
practice which obviated any trouble of opening and closing doors. He
had been prone to sitting half in half out of a window, with his legs
dangling to the ground; when he occupied the post in June, he had felt
himself like an old Greek crowned with roses, and as it was his only
chance of such a distinction he had borne with stoicism sundry pricks
and scratches from aggressive stems, and faced philosophically the
dropping of rose leaves—possibly of earwigs and ladybirds—within the
collar of his coat.
Oliver was exceedingly fond of the old parlour, and he was decidedly
not fond of Fan’s drawing-room; at the same time he was cast in a
different mould from the Squire of Copley Grange. Oliver had his
own views on æsthetics as on everything else, but the pattern of a
wall-paper or the tone of a carpet did not cost him agonies. He was not
always calling out for calm and repose and key notes. His residence
in Oxford had no doubt cultivated his taste without his knowing it,
but the training had failed to beget in him a special mania—apart
from intrinsic beauty or pleasant associations—for old oak and blue
china, Venetian glass, or Queen Anne needlework, unless the last were
the homely old garden-flower which bears that name. Now, as it had
more than once occurred to him, if Fan had been in some of the men’s
rooms, and had possessed rooms of her own, she would by this time have
been engulfed beyond the redemption of her natural taste in a charmed
region of dim and soft hues, faded colours and faint tracery varied by
bold interjections; she would have sat surrounded by mystic dados,
quaint Indian and Japanese matting, stately Jacobian chairs, gorgeous
peacock’s plumes and sunflowers. Yet it was Oliver and not Fan—as
both were aware—who was imaginative and susceptible. Except where her
prominent bump of order was concerned, it was he and not she, who was
sensitively affected by the surroundings; above all it was he who was
tenderly faithful to his first love in household gods, as in inanimate
nature.
Oliver and Fan Constable talked at dinner of the hundred-and-one
nothings which the members of one family, meeting after some months’
separation which has not divided the speakers in more than space, find
to interest them. Oliver took occasion to remark, _à propos_ of the
dinner itself, that Sally Pope had not lost her skill, and that he was
quite able to do justice to her fried soles and lamb cutlets though
he had dined at Paddington. He had not meant either to try Sally’s
patience, or to keep Fan’s dinner waiting. He had intended to come in
for her tea.
‘I don’t mind dining late, indeed, I greatly prefer it,’ said Fan with
decision; ‘and since—since poor father is gone,’ it was an effort for
her still to get out the words, though she showed no inclination to
cry,—she was not the ordinary sort of woman, who is given to express
her deepest feelings in tears,—‘we have not his tastes and habits to
think of first. There is no need for you to dine early after you have
been so long accustomed to dine late in hall.’
‘The hour for dining in hall is not considered late feeding-time
now-a-days,’ said Oliver, carelessly; ‘but it is a great deal too late
for me,’ he added, with more interest. ‘I am not like you, Fan; I
detest dining late. I stick to one o’clock as the hour which appetite,
common sense, the testimony of our ancestors, and the practice of our
continental neighbours have all agreed to honour. I know what you are
going to say, that noon is the correct time. Well, I don’t object to
anticipate matters; dining at noon is nearly the only mediæval custom,
about the restitution of which, with advantage, I am quite clear.’
‘I was not going to propose dining at noon,’ denied Fan, emphatically;
‘it would be an exceedingly inconvenient arrangement, unless households
rose at daybreak again.’
‘And why not?’ inquired Oliver, innocently.
‘Why not, indeed?’ retorted Fan, with lively impatience. ‘It is
sufficient they don’t, and few people would like to form solitary
exceptions. You may try it yourself if you like; not that I mean to say
you’re a bad riser as it is.’
‘I don’t often see the sun rise in summer,’ acknowledged Oliver,
penitently, as he carved Sally’s _pièce de resistance_. He carved
badly—worse than his father had carved, causing Fan, who was an expert
in such feats, to fidget and marvel afresh. But Oliver himself was not
in the least put out by his deficiency in table accomplishments.
‘If sunrise is so well worth seeing in Switzerland,’ continued Oliver,
‘it cannot be wholly unworthy of our notice here, as our actions seem
to imply.’
‘But if you get up in time for the sunrise, you must be content to go
to bed with the sun,’ said Fan; ‘when all your neighbours are widest
awake and fullest of life.’
‘There’s the rub,’ admitted Oliver, shaking his finely-proportioned
head, with its towselled thatch; ‘but there ought to be some
compensation.’
‘I don’t think you men, wise as you are, take consequences into
consideration sufficiently,’ dogmatised Fan.
‘My dear child, don’t treat us to ironical flattery, though I grant
ours is a belated kind of wisdom, so that we have to go to you women
to make it practical for us. There was Greatorex, one of our tutors,
who kept me in company in groaning over dinner in hall not being supper
and the winding up of the day at once, supposing we were condemned to
eat a meal in common. You will say the remedy was in Greatorex’s hands
as well as in mine, but he never found it till he married a nice young
soul who condescended to work out his theory for him. He has his dinner
now at the time he ought to have eaten his lunch, but generally forgot
or made a muddle of it. He is saved from becoming an ignoble martyr to
mingled starvation and dyspepsia quite as much as to work. He has his
evening stroll or his book, and his wife’s music by his own fireside
in winter, when other men are at table, where he can join them for a
little variety when he chooses.’
‘Ay, the little variety when he chooses, which no doubt will be pretty
frequently, makes all the difference in the world,’ said Fan, drily.
‘But I thought, Oliver, men could not work after dinner?’
‘Can’t they?’ questioned Oliver, with equal dryness. ‘What! not after
an hour’s rest such as a labouring man takes? Why, they do it every day
they live when they eat a sufficient meal and call it luncheon. If they
eat less it is at the peril of their health, with the temptation to
gorge in the evening.’
‘But head work, Oliver, head work,’ remonstrated Fan.
‘Is much like other work,’ maintained Oliver, stoutly. ‘It is not head
work which stands in the way. Are you such an innocent as to suppose
that head work is the engrossing occupation of the mass of the men at
Oxford, or, for that matter, the mass of late diners? You may as well
say prayers and have done with it. Bless you, Fan, I wish you saw
some of the drags coming into the town, or watched the men in their
boats at every hour of the twelve save the dinner-hour. True, many of
the undergraduates do their reading on the water, only the subjects
of study are apt to consist of the “Field” or “Bell’s Life,” or the
fastest, trashiest novel.’
‘But you read, Oliver,’ protested Fan, almost indignantly, for she
had not so many cherished visions that she could afford to have one
demolished in this cool manner.
‘Oh yes, I read,’ he asserted, as the simplest matter of course. ‘There
are always some fellows who sap, some men whose business and pleasure
are made up of reading under any circumstances. And I may give it as
my experience that a proportion of the reading men are of my mind and
Greatorex’s. How I did envy Greatorex going home to eat his wholesome
little early dinner—call it a dinner of herbs, if you like—in peace,
tête-à-tête with his wife, in his own little dining-room; returning to
Mrs. Greatorex’s cheerful, pretty tea-table, walking with her, having
his book, and his lounge, and smoke, his song and his chat afterwards;
supping with his family, perhaps bidding a solitary beggar like me,
who did not go in much for riotous “wines,” share his supper, like a
Christian and a gentleman.’
‘But “the feast of reason and the flow of soul,” the very spirit of the
feast, there would not be room for that, Oliver?’ It was characteristic
of Fan that she never contracted her brother’s name.
‘“Oceans of room,” according to Traddles the immortal. Where there is
a will there is a way, Fannikin. Besides, you are referring to a rare
sort of spice, not often to be found at any dinner, “late or ear’,”
as Sandy Carmichael would say. Now you are the lady of the house,
will your ladyship let me carry the claret, and the strawberries,
and biscuits over to the mill gallery? It is the hour, as a hundred
poets have sung in a thousand styles of verse, as well as the season
for enjoying the cream of out-of-door delights, including beetles and
bats—but I’ll smoke the last away to a respectful distance if you
object to them. Don’t let us lose more of the first evening, and Fan,
what an evening! The sun is not to say shining on us, he is setting
for us, like an affable, royal old fellow, at the height of his June
splendour. Come along, Fan.’
She would much rather have gone to the drawing-room, but, to do her
justice, she had always humoured Oliver in trifles. She went with him
without apparent reluctance, only trying in vain to make him leave
the transference of the wine and fruit to the housemaid, whom Fan had
drilled into a deft and dexterous table-maid.
‘No, no!’ Oliver would have his way; ‘you go before, and I follow
after. Imagine yourself a lady of the last century, Fan, with a black
boy grinning, and covetously eyeing the best strawberries in the dish,
at your heels.’
Then she had to wait a little impatiently till he exchanged a jesting
compliment with Sally Pope, who had smoothed her ruffled plumes, put on
her afternoon gown, and was ready to waylay and have a word with the
young master on his return, as he passed across the court. Had she not
done so, unquestionably Oliver would have repaired to Sally’s region of
the house before the end of the evening.
‘Welcome home, Master Oliver, the sight of you is good for an old
woman’s eyes,’ Sally hailed him.
‘Of course, Sally, and ain’t I growing a handsomer fellow every day?
As for you, why you look a dozen years younger than you did last
summer. You’ll be having the banns put up, and coming upon me for a
wedding-present before I have time to think what it shall be.’
‘Come, now, Master Oliver, none of your young man’s chaff—and me old
enough to be your granny,’ remonstrated Sally, with great relish of the
stale joke.
Fan was considerate of Sally’s claims where they did not interfere with
the girl’s own plans. She was substantially kind to the old woman,
and Sally, like everybody else who came in contact with Fan, had a
just respect and regard for her young mistress. Notwithstanding this
laudable sentiment, Sally looked upon life in the light that it was
alike her duty and privilege to bear her testimony against the crying
sin and folly of new-fangled, upstart ways, and to resist them to the
utmost of her power. The opposition was fruitless; Miss Fan got the
better of the old housekeeper, and Sally was not without a secret,
half-grudging admiration of the girl’s capacity for ruling.
But the old servant entertained a totally different kind of pride in
Master Oliver—of fondness half-protecting, half-reliant for him. She
detained him at this moment entirely with his own will, though to the
chagrin of his sister.
Fan could not understand Oliver’s accessibility to servants, and his
ease with them. She was tempted to think he did not know and keep his
own place where they were concerned. On the other hand, this conclusion
did not coincide with some of her independent observations. Fan had
a candour and liberality of observation, in spite of her essential
narrowness and concentration of mind, which forced her often to remark
effects that puzzled her in her rooted convictions. Fan had learnt
from local gossip that there was something of the same bearing as that
of Oliver towards his servants in Mr. Ayott of Copley Grange to his
confidential and superannuated gamekeepers and nurses. She could not be
altogether sure that the simplicity and geniality were not among those
secrets of good breeding which were somehow beyond her acquisition.
Certainly no servant abused Oliver’s frankness and _bonhomie_.
The brother and sister stood in the twilight darkness of the oldest
room in the mill, empty at this hour. Oliver would have paused again
to make comments on what machinery was dimly revealed, and what store
of grain could be faintly discerned. But Fan, who had never from her
childhood cared for such details, nipped his intention in the bud and
dragged him on. ‘You said you wanted to be in the open air, dear; don’t
stay in this musty-fusty place, where I always dread rats.’ Then they
went out into the gallery.
Oliver pulled out a pile of new sacks to serve as a seat for Fan,
and converted a full sack into a pedestal to support the tray he had
carried. For himself he was content to loll on the old carved railing,
hunching up his shoulders, sinking his head in his breast, thrusting
out his bearded chin, squaring his moustached mouth, and blinking
with his brown eyes, contriving altogether to look as like a dwarf or
humpback, with the grotesquely ugly face which would have served for a
gurgoyle, as a stalwart, comely Englishman could well look.
At the couple’s feet flowed the Brook, over which the long pendent
boughs of the great willow drooped and swayed and dipped their
leaves—the blue-green of which was whitened, yellowed, and stained
with olive in the water. Before the two stretched the undulating bosky
park of Copley Grange, with the rich foliage of its fine trees still
in the gay vivid green of June, before it has grown dull, heavy, and
monotonous under the heat of July, with the red and white clusters of
the thorns competing with the red and white spikes of the chestnuts.
The sun was sinking like a ball of fire in the gold and crimson west,
where all the magnificence of the sky was still gathered, leaving
what had been the dim soft blue of a midsummer day, for a moment, by
contrast, cold in its purity in the east.
No nightingale yet lifted up his voice and poured forth his fervent
appeal, but a whole chorus of thrushes and blackbirds spoke and
answered in their hearts’ content. Occasionally the continuous gurgle
of the water was broken and accentuated by the leap of a trout or the
splash of a water-rat.
Oliver looked and listened in silence for some time, turning his face
to the sunset light. Then he suddenly, and as it were, involuntarily,
took off his cap, and the radiance about his head brought out threads
of chestnut and gold in his brown hair.
He drew a long breath—a kind of sighing heigho! as with a depth of
enjoyment that by reason of its very depth had a strain of sadness
in it, because of the shallowness and transitoriness of all human
pleasure, and then announced, confidentially, that people ought not
to boast, but he believed Friarton Mill in its own peculiar line beat
England, beat Europe hollow for beauty.
‘Yes, it is beautiful here,’ said Fan, quietly, with her eyes turning
naturally to the pillars and arcades of that unfortunate Italian front
to Copley Grange, seen at the end of the vista directly opposite the
mill. ‘I know judges object to the house, and Mr. Ayott cannot bear
it. If he had money enough he would pull it down and begin rebuilding
to-morrow. They know best, no doubt, and I am prepared to be told it
is bad taste in me, but the house always strikes me as stately and
imposing.’
‘I was not thinking of the house,’ said Oliver; ‘but I don’t see
why it should not be allowed a sort of English classicism, though
of course its Italian classicism is humbug here. It is not without
associations,—calls up George Lord Lyttelton and Johnson’s “Lives of
the Poets.”’
‘Not to me,’ said honest Fan; ‘but I wonder,’ she persisted, sticking
to her idea, and desiring, without changing the conversation abruptly,
and putting a point-blank question with brutal plainness, to lead
the talk to the great point with which she began to think Oliver was
dallying, seeking to keep it in the background, ‘I wonder you are so
little critical of Copley Grange and so much in love with Friarton Mill
after you have been at Oxford.’
Oxford was Fan’s Rome or Jerusalem. She had visited Oxford more than
once in Commemoration Week, and though that was hardly the proper
season at which to estimate academical glories, it had been enough for
her to see her brother at home among distinguished men and refined
women. Fan secretly hoped that Oliver’s destination, with her own
in his company, would be Oxford. In spite of what he had told her,
his university town still stood to her in the light of the capital of
the great English empire of letters—not a Bohemian empire, but such
a dignified, decorous, learned empire as Fan’s soul loved, to which
Oliver had a birthright and title, to which his claim would be Fan’s
passport. Nowhere else, she fancied, could they without pretence get
into such good society, escaping finally from the penalties of the most
unvarnished trading antecedents.
‘Everything in its own place,’ said Oliver, lightly. ‘I am fond of my
“’Varsity,” too—of every stone of my college. I think Cambridge is the
only place worthy of being named in the same breath with Oxford. I do
not give a rap for the pretensions of Salamanca, or Padua, or Paris,
or Heidelberg, or Zurich, or Edinburgh, matched with those of Oxford
and Cambridge. I am as besottedly proud of my “’Varsity” as an Oxonian
and a John Bull can be. But after all, my connection with it, though I
shall never forget it, was a passing accident compared to my life-long
connection with this place.’
Fan’s hopes fell a little. Oliver’s words, however appreciative of
his ‘’Varsity,’ did not indicate an intention of returning to it and
settling in it. ‘I am afraid it will cost you a pang to leave Friarton
Mill,’ suggested Fan, still feeling her way to her object, as the
sincerest woman will sometimes.
‘But I am not going to leave it,’ said Oliver, with quiet assurance,
staring down into the water, as if in contradiction of the words which
the poet had put into its mouth—
‘Men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.’
‘At least, not so long as I can help it, I hope,’ Oliver corrected
himself quickly; ‘not till I have to make that exodus which lies
before every mother’s son of us.’
‘My dear boy, what are you thinking of?’ Fan was driven to ask, in
discomfited surprise and bewilderment. ‘Father was not able to make you
independent of a profession. You may, indeed, become one of the masters
of the Grammar School in the town here. But oh! Oliver, I am sure it
would be a great mistake. The Fremantles and the Wrights,’ naming the
families of two of Oliver’s old patrons among the masters, ‘have been
kind, but even they, while they are ready to acknowledge your honours,
don’t forget that you are the son of a tradesman.’
‘They are heartily welcome to remember it,’ said Oliver, with perhaps
more heat than there was occasion for. ‘What! deny our father, Fan, who
never did a thing to be ashamed of? which is what few men’s sons in any
rank can say. It is my turn to wonder. My origin is the last thing I
should wish my associates to forget if I were to become a master in
Friarton, which I have not the slightest intention of being.’
‘You know that is not what I meant,’ protested Fan, growing pale with
reproach and excitement; ‘I loved and honoured father with all my
heart, Oliver, you know I did. And it is no dishonour to his memory to
say that while I am proud to think he had qualities far above those
of an ordinary tradesman, I am sorry he had to go into trade, and to
continue in it all his life.’
‘I don’t know what you call an ordinary tradesman,’ said Oliver; ‘but
though I am perfectly aware that you were the best of daughters, Fan,—I
would not for a moment think of questioning it,—I must in common truth
blame you for inconsistency. My father, who was as you say all his life
in trade, had not the opinion of it which you appear to hold; and I
must say to look upon trade as degrading, is rather an odd way, though
you don’t intend it, of honouring the man who was pleased to be the
miller and baker of Friarton.’
‘Father was an old man who belonged to another generation than ours,’
Fan defended herself.
‘I have no doubt there were as many fools in the past generation as in
the present,’ growled Oliver, not very politely, but his spirit was
beginning to kindle into a flame.
‘He got on in the world,’ continued Fan, paying no attention to the
growl. ‘Our starting-point, thanks to him, is not what his was. He
was willing that you should go to Oxford and become a scholar and
gentleman.’
‘Yes, God bless him!’ said Oliver, shortly.
‘After all I cannot think what we are arguing about;’ Fan took herself
back with a faint smile. ‘Over what you imagine is my undervaluation of
trade—but that is past so far as we are concerned. And I promise to
respect any profession you may choose, Oliver.’
‘I am not going in for any profession,’ said Oliver, still a little
moodily. He was a man by nature eager for the sympathy of those he
cared for, though he was not dependent upon it, and he knew he would
get no sympathy from Fan in what he was about to do, therefore he had
instinctively put off to the last moment telling her his intention.
‘Are you going abroad then?’ inquired Fan, with her heart sinking
fathoms deeper than at its first disappointment.
Was Oliver, her only brother, all that she had in the light of mere
kindred, deliberately purposing to cut himself off from her? He
professed to put small weight on his advantages; but was he meaning
to let them—as in the case of so many men who rose in the world—be
the means of creating a gulf between him and the single person who
represented his relations and his early life? Which of the two was the
inconsistent person?
Oliver penetrated so far into Fan’s suspicions—they were altogether
unjust, but they were too cruel towards herself for him to resent the
reflection they cast on him.
‘My dear Fan, didn’t you hear me say I was going to live and die at
Friarton Mill?’ he contented himself with putting it strongly.
‘But what are you to do here?’ demanded Fan, in a voice half mystified,
half sharp. She felt a little relieved; but such a terrible suspicion
was rising in the background of her thoughts that it threatened not
merely to cloud her returning serenity, but to overwhelm it more
entirely even than the apprehension of her brother’s forsaking her had
done. Oliver at his best had always been somewhat incomprehensible to
Fan, unmoved by the things which keenly affected her, powerfully worked
upon by influences which did not touch her. They had always been an
affectionate brother and sister, but in some respects they had never
been of one mind and soul from babyhood upwards; she felt at this
moment of doubt and alarm that she could not venture to predict what
Oliver might not do or leave undone at any crisis of his history.
‘Of course be a miller and baker, like all the heads of the family I
ever heard of,’ said Oliver, trying hard to look and speak as if he
were not aware that he was inflicting a shock on his sister. But the
fact was he was agitated in giving his decision, and he showed the
amount of his agitation, by relinquishing the bodily contortions in
which he was prone to indulge. He stood up tall and straight facing
Fan, merely thrusting his hands into the depths of his pockets, as he
proceeded to unfold his intentions. ‘I shall bolt the cleanest flour,
and bake the purest bread, and have my finger in the capital and labour
pie—there is an appropriate figure for you; and as bread is the staff
of life, and the capital and labour question one of the most vexed
questions of the day, I should think the duties and interests involved
will last my time.’
CHAPTER IV.
A HOT ARGUMENT.
‘YOU will never do it,’ gasped Fan, rising to her feet also.
‘Yes, I will,’ said Oliver, now perching himself precariously on the
ancient carved railing. ‘I mean what I say and I will do what I mean.’
‘What! waste all your talents and education?’
‘I should not call them wasted; “the better man the better deed.” If I
have any talent out of the common—’
‘You know you have; what is the good of mock humility?’ poor Fan
assailed him.
‘Well, granted I am not a blockhead, even granted I were a genius,
which would be a gross delusion—stop, I’ll light my pipe, as we’ve got
the length of talking the matter calmly over.’
He had recovered his composure and cheerfulness the moment he had
broken the truth to his sister, but that did not make the truth less
exasperating to Fan.
‘Hans Sachs,’ Oliver recommenced with easy discursiveness, ‘remained at
once a minnesinger and a cobbler, and I do not know that he either sang
or cobbled the worse for it. You will go and listen with satisfaction
to an opera of Wagner’s, but not take the moral of the text into
account, you most illogical of Fans. Hans Sachs lived in the blooming
time of Nüremberg, in the middle ages to be sure. You may think the
world has grown too old for simplicity and a higher ambition than
rising above the class one was born in.’
‘What is a higher ambition?’ interrupted Fan, abruptly and
incredulously.
‘To raise one’s class and rise with it—much the truer and surer, if
it be the slower process,’ answered Oliver, without hesitation or
circumlocution, as announcing a thought out and incontrovertible
proposition. ‘But if you think Hans Sachs forms too remote a precedent,
there is Jasmin, the French barber and poet, quite in our day. And I
have heard of a very worthy fellow who is also more than a poetaster,
and has yet worked out his “shifts” like a man, going down day by
day with his pick and his lamp into the blackness of darkness of a
Scotch coal mine. I tell you, child, it is the notion that ability
and education will not grace any honest calling and station which is
the essence of snobbishness and vulgarity. It has tainted every class
in this country. It plays the very devil with many a man who might
otherwise have been respected and respectable, a useful citizen and
worthy member of society. It causes a certain order of talents and
refined tastes to prove a curse instead of a blessing to a working
man, even to a clerk, or a shop-lad. I look upon it,’ said Oliver with
restrained passion, ‘as being at the bottom of much of the unprincipled
extravagance, fraudulent speculation, and criminality and misery which
are eating out—not to say the prosperity—the integrity of the nation.’
‘Then you would introduce Hindoo castes or Russian serfdom into
England?’ Fan was a little confused and incoherent in her examples,
which was not like her, for she was clear-headed as far so she saw,
but she was driven nearly beside herself. ‘You would forbid any man to
exercise the gifts which God has given him, and rise to their level in
the social scale.’
‘I would do nothing of the kind. I would have every man be a law to
himself, and act up to his own standard—doing his best to raise that
standard. I don’t quarrel with any fellow for abandoning tailoring—say,
and adopting painting—always provided he has a clear justification for
the change by finding it absolutely necessary for the expression of the
gift that is in him. I only say that it is done a thousand times every
day, when it is neither justifiable nor necessary. It is high time
somebody made a stand against the disloyalty and folly.’
‘And you are the somebody who knows better than every one else!’ said
Fan, sarcastically.
There had always been great freedom of opinion and speech between the
brother and sister in the middle of their warm mutual regard. Oliver
was not the man to behave like a Turk to his womankind. Fan had not
been accustomed to be treated as an inane dove, neither was she the
woman to consent readily to the treatment, whether from father,
brother, husband or son.
‘Oh, Oliver, how can you be so conceited and self-willed?’ she
protested, indignantly. ‘I thought you were too clever—really, not to
be modest; I begin to think learning has made you mad!’
Oliver shrugged his shoulders.
‘An unlucky, unintentional quotation, my dear, which, after all, I dare
not presume to take to myself. But I am not the only man who holds
views which, thank God, are gaining ground in our day. Look here,
Fan, I hope this is not altogether a case of want of ambition, sloth,
a taste for low life—if you care to apply that term to the trading
class to which our father belonged. It is a point of conscience which
is beginning to be mooted among men, whether or not they may be able
to act upon it as they ought. You think a great deal of Oxford. If
you were down there, you would find some reading men, far before
me in scholarship, regretting that they had not learned a trade and
maintaining the dignity of labour in its most primitive form.’
‘Young men will take up any crochet for the sake of contradiction,’
said Fan, with a girl’s narrow dogmatism and ready scorn.
‘Still, if it is any comfort to you,’ continued Oliver, with a laugh
not so genial as his laugh was wont to be, ‘there are far more cads
and fools in Oxford and the world than such would be reformers—idiotic
as you may reckon them in their own line. There are fellows who,
like Tito, would not only cut as neatly as possible their greatest
benefactors if they happened to be grocers and linen-drapers, but would
go far beyond Tito in boasting of the creditable performance. There
are numbers of young Englishmen prepared to turn their backs, on the
first opportunity, on the iron or the cotton by which their fathers
have played their parts, according to their lights, like men, with
success (while the iron and the cotton trades were never in greater
need of fresh light and guidance), all in order that young England in
this direction may vegetate, run to seed, starve or steal, as officers
whom the piping times of peace suit best, briefless barristers, or
incompetent clergymen.’
‘But you would not be a briefless barrister or an incompetent
clergyman,’ said Fan.
Oliver shook his head. ‘I cannot speak in public, I can only hold forth
to my own cronies.’
This was true; Oliver was not calculated to shine as an orator; his
highly wrought nervous awkwardness was entirely against him; a certain
turgidness in the rush of his thoughts proved even a more serious
obstacle.
Occasionally, when he was ‘dead in earnest,’ as he said, he could
surmount both defects. He would then speak tersely and clearly while
he towered the head and shoulders above his brethren, and flung out an
arm with something like might and majesty. But, as a rule, a singular
shyness and self-consciousness came over the young man in any general
assemblage, from a debating club upwards, and left him a fettered and
dumb giant.
‘I should make a bad advocate and a worse judge,’ said Oliver; ‘I have
not the making of a good lawyer in me—none of the sifting impartiality,
critical acumen, and hard-headed common sense which ought to dispense
justice. My own ideas, instead of authorities and precedents, would
possess me. You have only to put on a wig and gown in order to be a
sounder, safer judge yourself, though I can’t flatter you, little
woman, by pretending you would prove another Portia.’
‘But a clergyman is different,’ said Fan, faintly.
He shook the whole man, not his head alone, in his impatience. ‘Do
you suppose I should think myself warranted in becoming a clergyman
if I had not the highest motive and the clearest bent?’ he demanded,
with more indignant sharpness than he had yet spoken. ‘I would rather
break stones on the road. I might preserve my self-respect as an
honest man while I hammered at flints; I should certainly despise
myself as a profane cheat and liar if I offered spiritual stones for
bread—all because the Church was a gentleman’s calling, and by great
good fortune, policy, energy, and carefully cultivated interest I might
die a right reverend bishop. I wonder though if a miller and baker’s
son ever did die a bishop—out of the colonies,’ speculated Oliver with
returning good humour.
‘Oliver,’ said Fan, solemnly, ‘I cannot think you are in earnest. I
seem not able to believe my ears. After father resigned your services,
after you have kept all your terms, taken more than one scholarship
and gained this first class, which everybody who knows anything about
it said you could do, and added that it would be a great honour to you
and the making of you in any profession, to throw it all up in the end,
to act as if you had been keeping another man out of his place, and
wasting money the whole time! For you would have made as good—I should
say a far better miller,’ (Fan could not bring herself to say the word
baker,) ‘if you had never gone to Oxford, if you had left the Grammar
School when you were fourteen or fifteen at the latest, and served your
apprenticeship like other lads who meant to be tradesmen, and then
father might have had your help in his old age.’
‘There is something in that,’ answered Oliver in a low tone, with the
pain which the reminder roused in him perceptible in his voice. ‘I
shall never cease to regret that I did not see things as I do now from
the first. I would give a great deal even to have made up my mind
sooner—in time to tell father. But nothing will convince me that he
would have opposed my decision.’
‘He might have said that you were spoilt either for a miller or for
anything else,’ retorted Fan.
‘If he had done so, it would have been the result of an old-fashioned
prejudice; and if I had been able to show him that he was in the wrong,
he would have been the first to admit it gladly,’ said Oliver, keeping
his temper. ‘Why, on earth, should a man not make as good a miller—or
coal-heaver for that matter—because he knows a little Latin and Greek,
and can read Horace and Virgil, Sophocles and Plato, in the original,
if he chose, when his work is done?’
Fan was getting desperate. No one save herself could tell how grievous
had been the downfall of all the castles in the air which she had been
building since her earliest girlhood, while she sat or stood, during
the last half-hour, in the familiar mill gallery, looking down, as she
had looked many a time before, on the lovely home landscape, in the
midsummer twilight, and only betraying her emotion by her changing
colour and tightly clasped hands. It was all so utterly wrong-headed
and delirious in Oliver; what one might have expected in a French
Communist, but what one could never have imagined would find a fitting
soil at Oxford.
Fan had prepared herself for so different a conclusion. She would have
done anything, taken any pains and faced any ordeal for Oliver—the
Oliver of her dreams. Had he been called to fill a throne, she would
have toiled to qualify herself to stand on its lowest step. She was
one of those women who have high enterprise in their composition. But
if Oliver’s regalia were to consist, after all, of the mill-wheel and
the baker’s oven, which had been thorns in Fan’s flesh when they were
connected with her father and grandfather, she had not the enterprise
to follow her brother in that adventure.
‘Oh! Oliver, if you would only think it all over again!’ besought
Fan, with tears, which she had too much pride and endurance to shed,
dimming her bright dark eyes, as the evening star came out above the
Copley Grange woods, and glimmered over the two. ‘You have been away
from home, for the most part, for years and years, ever since you
were little more than a boy. You have forgotten what the conditions
of a tradesman’s life really are, how hopelessly commonplace and
vulgar—worse in some respects than the life of a day labourer.
There may be some dignity in hard toil and grinding poverty bravely
borne—though I should not like to be the one to bear them,’ said
Fan, in parenthesis; yet even as she spoke Oliver recognised that
this worldly-minded little sister of his was a woman who, in the
circumstances she referred to, would have been found capable of working
herself to death and making no sign, dying with the elements of true
tragedy and pathos in the self-respecting silence and resignation
of her humble end. ‘But I cannot see how there can be dignity in
ordinary buying and selling, in low chaffering and huxtering, and often
cheating.’
‘You are talking utter nonsense, Fan,’ said Oliver, half amused,
half angry. ‘There is nothing dishonouring in trade, any more than
in a handicraft; you might have known that. There is dignity in any
honest work which a man does in the sweat of his brow. It is idleness,
however refined, which is clear degradation and a blot on the social
economy. We have surely got a long way ahead of the early nations
that committed every useful art to their slaves. When we go out now,
with the laudable aim of civilising savages, don’t we first qualify
ourselves—those of us who have spent our youth in the colleges—by
graduating in carpenters’ and masons’ work, cooking and tailoring?’
‘That may be the way among savages,’ said Fan, with a nice distinction,
‘but at home we have not, in practice at least, gone so far beyond the
old theory.’
‘My dear Fan, have you never heard that we are a nation of shopkeepers?
How have you managed to shut your ears! In what corner have you been
hiding?’
‘Don’t laugh,’ said Fan, passionately; ‘I am not able to bear it. And
you must know that when English people of the upper classes own to
be shopkeepers, it is on a grand scale like the merchant princes of
Venice.’
‘Or Tyre and Sidon,’ suggested Oliver ‘and we know what they came to;
but don’t starve your simile.’
‘Trade, or anything on a grand scale,’ floundered Fan, ‘where the
interests involved extend far and wide and where the petty details
hardly reach the head trader, is very different from a small business,
with its meanness and sordidness.’
‘Call nothing common and unclean which human beings require,’ muttered
Oliver; and then he could not resist resuming his banter.
‘I have you now, Fan; you go in for the gulf between wholesale and
retail, in the comparative offences of selling a bar of iron and a
tin-tack. What a humbug you are!’
She disdained to defend herself from an accusation which was
particularly untrue and objectionable to her.
‘I am sensible that there is a tremendous amount of humbug in society
in the present day. Doubtless it has existed in every generation, but
in ours, I think, the crop is an unusually fine one,’ commented Oliver,
with provoking coolness. He was swinging one leg with a laziness that
had an irritation in the very slowness of the movement—monotonous as
that of a pendulum. Then he stopped the pendulum, but caused it to
quiver quickly, in a still more trying manner, until Fan, under the
torture, was fain to cry out as if she had been a vixen.
‘If you don’t keep your leg still, this moment, Oliver, I—I believe I
shall leap down into the water. You ought to have been whipped when you
were a child till you learned to stand and sit still.’
‘But you see I wasn’t; and I believe it would have been next to an
impossibility to teach me,’ said Oliver, stopping on the instant,
contritely. He would not willingly have hurt a fly if he could have
avoided it, though he was compelled to wound Fan to the quick. Happily
for him, he could not sound the depths of her prejudices, or altogether
realise the pain he was inflicting. But he struggled not to chaff
her any more, since she was so thin-skinned and so much vexed by his
determination. He reverted to general illustrations of humbugs. ‘I
will say nothing of the curious favour which is shown to brewers in
these days; but though I don’t go in for total abstinence, and can
sing out for a glass of beer with an easy conscience, it seems to me,
in the name of morality, the baker ought to be esteemed the better
tradesman of the two. Let me refer further to the odd fact that a
squireen, or duke, or a prince, with an agricultural hobby may farm
his own land, grow corn, and fatten beeves, without coming under the
ban of a spurious gentility—odious word, Fan! But society holds that
when the same corn comes to be ground into flour and kneaded into
bread, and the same cattle to be slaughtered and cut into beef—very
essential processes for the welfare of the million, the men who take
the processes in hand and pledge themselves to bring them to a fair
issue, are justly to lose all social status, and sink in the scale
to depths of vulgarity lower than the brutality of the most stupid,
ignorant, ragged, dirty lout! (Of course you understand I am pointing
my moral by an extreme instance of the working man.) Now, I maintain
that if we had—in addition to the great farming landowner, and to that
extraordinary exception in position to other tradesmen, the great
brewer—the great baker, butcher——’
‘Fishmonger and greengrocer,’ chimed in Fan, mockingly.
‘Why not?’ Oliver accepted the addition undauntedly. ‘Men who should
endow the world with excellent bread, wholesome meat, fresh fish—at
reasonable prices, do you see? for the credit of their trades and the
good of humanity—not merely that the baker and his fellow-tradesmen
might make haste to grow rich and cut the shop, rear their sons for
professions, and marry their daughters to professional men as the
first step to a higher social grade—they would deserve to be ranked as
public benefactors. I should not wonder,’ declared Oliver, breaking
out into fun again, ‘though I had a statue erected to me one day for
leading the van in the beneficent movement. Most likely I shan’t be
there to see. It won’t be, I dare say, till I’m “Old Constable” to a
third or fourth generation. But if the world is only a little quicker
in its appreciation and gratitude than it is wont to be, as you are
my junior by a few years, it is just on the cards, if you live to
be ninety-nine, Fannikin, you may behold the tribute. Won’t it be
glorious! Won’t you be proud of me then?’
‘Oh don’t,’ groaned Fan. And Oliver repented of an inveterate
propensity to relieve with a kind of light humour his gravest moods.
Then Fan rallied sufficiently to say, ‘If the statue be true to life,
it will be like that of Horatius Cocles, “halting on one knee,” or
doing something equally uncouth and grotesque.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Oliver, who had little personal vanity, and who
was glad, in the innocence of his heart, to suppose Fan was not so much
hurt that she could not take him off in her turn. But Fan was simply
galled into irony. She was sharpening her weapons in the little silence
which succeeded for a new assault on her brother’s position.
‘Any ordinary man may be such a tradesman as you describe.’
‘The ordinary man is long of coming, then,’ he interrupted her briskly.
She paid no heed to the interruption. ‘An extraordinary man only rises
to his natural level when he forsakes some common occupation for
another more in keeping with his powers. You may as well pretend that
God made all men equal in every respect, and it is a sin and wrong
that there should be different classes in society, as hold that your
talents and education can be fitly applied to a trade.’
‘No. I say every new social movement demands extraordinary men to be
its pioneers. I confess I am rather ashamed to give myself out as the
extraordinary man in this case, but I may serve till a better appear.’
‘It is not trade as it ought to be, it is trade as it is, which you
are bound to take into account before you throw away all your hard-won
advantages. High-flown notions may be all very well in theory, but they
are not for real life,’ said Fan, hardly sensible that she was airing
a terribly unchristian doctrine, only aware that Oliver was shaking
himself in vehement protest. ‘The tricks of trade are proverbial.’
‘Disgracefully proverbial,’ assented Oliver, briefly. ‘But if I thought
they were universal I should be fit to hang myself. Do you infer that
our father was not an honest man?’
‘I have never said a word against father’s honesty,’ protested Fan,
hotly. ‘I believe he was as honest as man could be. But he went into
trade for a livelihood, not to regenerate society, as you are bold
enough to propose. You will ruin yourself in the first place, I know.’
‘Then I don’t know it, and what is more, I don’t mean to do it. That
is the common cant; no thinker outside the details of his trade can
steer clear of the bankruptcy court. And we have the disastrous fate of
Burns and of other thinkers—poets, politicians and what not, in their
respective businesses—lugged in as a timely warning. I tell you no
man’s thought and culture, unless they were attended by some radical
mental defect or fatal self-indulgence, ever disqualified him from
managing his worldly affairs. The reverse has been proved over and over
again; but it does not suit the commonplace world, and you as its
present exponent, to believe it. However, I am no poet or astronomer or
geologist. Unlike the Laird of Cockpen, my head is not taken up with
the affairs of the State. Even my scholarship is of modest dimensions.
Moreover, I shall make it my careful endeavour not to ruin myself,
were it only to give the lie to my self-complacent friends who go in
for business on what they call business principles, forsooth!—every
man for himself and the most money soonest made—as if there were not
sounder as well as higher laws of political economy than some of
the political economists themselves ever touched. But if I do ruin
myself in an attempt to regenerate society, as you, Fan, term—rather
grandiloquently—my simple resolution to stick to the old shop and do
the best I can with it, can I ruin myself in a worthier cause?’
Then, in contradiction to his disclaimer of anything remarkable in his
purpose, he began to repeat with repressed enthusiasm:—
‘Can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds?’
She would not let him finish the verse. She broke in with the old
fruitless adjuration, ‘Oh, Oliver, think again.’
CHAPTER V.
A LAST APPEAL.
‘THINK twice over what you are going to do,’ urged Fan, for the last
time. ‘I tell you that you look back on the past softened by distance,
and I suppose surrounded by a sort of halo of youthful associations and
kindly recollections. I have never been removed from Friarton Mill for
such a length of time as to forget all its ills and only remember its
advantages. How will you like to hang on in the mill and, worse, in
the bakehouse and shop—to be bearded by your own men, who will be the
first to recognise that you have not been bred to their trade and to
make good use of your ignorance—to be worsted by trades’ unions—for
I conclude bakers will go out “on strike,” if they have not yet done
so—like other work people? How will you stand being patronised by
the farmers and corn-dealers, and having to submit to the whims and
insolence of your customers?’
‘Upon my word, I do not see why I should stand either, if I do my
duty. And I would rather hang on in a mill or a bake-shop than in city
chambers draped round with cobwebs and filled with empty tin boxes
bearing lying titles, or in a vestry hall where I had no business to
be, or in a barrack yard where I should never learn the goose step, or
in stables or kennels.’
‘It is my duty to speak,’ said Fan, solemnly, developing a fine talent
for lecturing; ‘since you have been so long away, you have forgotten
or you do not rightly understand a great deal that will happen if you
persist in your folly. All the better class of people in Friarton—the
Fremantles and Wrights and that set, who took us up because they
expected you to become one of themselves and to do them credit—will
drop us again; and who can blame them? when they discover that you have
no ambition—that you have a taste for low company—so it will seem to
them. We shall of course fall back among the Polleys and the Dadds and
the rest of the tradespeople like ourselves,’ said Fan, bitterly. ‘We
choose their ranks deliberately as ours, and how can we expect that
the members of another rank will continue to stoop to us, or consent,
for our sake, to anything so disagreeable as being habitually mixed up
with people far beneath them in birth and breeding? Are you not able
to recall how dreadful a tea at the Dadds, or a supper at the Polleys,
used to be? How, when you were a boy and knew little else, you hated it
and shirked it, when father would let you?’
Oliver winced a little, but recovered himself gallantly. ‘I was an
intolerable young fool—giving myself airs, as old Dadd once told me
to my face. He is a shrewd intelligent old fellow in his linendrapery
line. One may easily listen to the experience of a far inferior man.’
‘Have you grown fonder of his coarse familiar jokes and the
all-pervading smell of his gin-and-water?’ asked Fan, with scornful
incredulity. ‘If so, perhaps you can also better appreciate young
Dadd’s jewellery and Mrs. Dadd’s mock “umbleness,” like Uriah Heep’s,
to hide her slyness and spitefulness. And you may have come to value,
at their proper worth, the Polley girls’ giggles and shams, and their
mother’s loud self-assertion and sheer impertinence. No doubt you
admire their combined illiterateness and absorption in the pettiest
gossip, their poor aping of the faults, or else their rude defiance of
the merits, of their social superiors. Don’t you know that the Dadd
and Polley idea of a life worth leading, is to make money in order to
eat, drink, and lie in bed, to keep sporting dogs, attend low races
and offer and accept bets, to have parties, “beaux,” and flirtations
to the girls’ hearts’ content? Are greediness, laziness, bumptiousness
and folly—gaudy, tawdry pretence, and coarse gorgeousness, such
admirable qualities in men and women and their surroundings? I declare
the Dadds and Polleys are the most irreverent undutiful people I know.
Oh! Oliver, it is too horrible that the end of your cleverness and
college training should be to condemn yourself, and me with you, to
close contact and hopeless association with such people—when we have no
relief to expect save from our own deterioration. We shall deteriorate
and grow like our neighbours speedily, I daresay, and then we may not
feel that we were ever fit for something better. But how we—one of
us, at least—must suffer in the process of deterioration before it is
complete!’
Fan was perfectly sincere, however absurd, in her horror and distress.
She had a natural abhorrence of the vulgar, gross self-indulgence
which she had described, and an intense yearning for its opposite,
the true refinement of simplicity, self-restraint, and self-devotion,
with its outward expression in the subtle charm of pure and graceful
harmony. There was this to be said for Fan’s ambition, that it was
not composed of coarse materials. It was neither sensual nor sordid.
Fan would have been very tolerably content to be a poor lady among
ladies and gentlemen. She would have made the very best of her gentle
poverty, because she fully comprehended the self-respect involved in
self-denial, the essential honour included in showing regard for the
rights and claims of her neighbours, and in energy, diligence, and
usefulness fitly exercised. Fan had the making of a real lady—rich or
poor—in her. And if she were not speaking under a delusion, it was a
pity that her vocation should be spoilt.
But Oliver dealt her a stern rebuke.
‘This is too bad,’ he said, indignantly, taking the pipe from his
mouth. ‘There is only one grain of truth in your tirade against the
class in which you were born—its members are guilty of aping the
faults of a higher class. As you have yourself said so, you cannot be
ignorant that greed, and its opposite—senseless extravagance, laziness,
levity, and worse, are safe to be found—just masked by a thin veneer
of polish—in still greater abundance among dukes and duchesses—or say
at once kings and queens, than among tradespeople. And you have said
nothing of the peculiar virtues of tradespeople. You spoke of Mrs.
Polley’s self-assertion. I grant it is offensive—but surely you have
been told what that woman has done for her family. When her husband
proved an incapable ne’er-do-well, who if left to himself would have
gone straight to the dogs, and reduced his children to the workhouse,
did not his “missus” come to the front and stand by her master like
a brick and a Trojan? She kept him from both his and her undoing. She
maintained Polley’s grocery business by her industry, and made it
flourish by her mother-wit, till now her husband is no worse than a
tolerably respectable nonentity, and her children have been reared in
independence and comfort. No blame will rest on her if they are not
able to hold their own in the world. I have often heard, and so have
you, my father and old Floyd praise that woman for her works. As for
Mrs. Dadd, I don’t say that her meekness is the real thing, but she is
not without true motherliness and kindness of heart. Have you forgotten
how she left her own child and came out and stayed here to nurse you
through scarlatina because she doubted Sally Pope’s experience and
ability to cope with the disease? For shame! Fan, a short memory is
unpardonable here.’
‘I have not forgotten,’ said Fan, pettishly; ‘if I had, I should not
have kept up the amount of intercourse with the Dadds I have consented
to keep.’
‘No doubt it is a great reward for her trouble and risk that you should
call for her—behaving civilly in the performance of your duty, I take
it for granted—once in three months,’ said Oliver, still in a fume. ‘I
am not of your opinion. But though I have not the same faith in the
light of my countenance, and the edification implied in the bestowal
of my company for a spare half-hour, still I have my own views on the
subject. But upon my honour, Fan, I hesitate at this moment under
a sense of my unworthiness, and a conception of these respectable
people’s positive virtues, to presume to weigh their comparative
defects and measure them against any supposed superiority of intellect
and training on my part. Are brains and culture—of which one hears
so much from pedants and puppies—to be named in the same breath with
honest men and women’s fidelity to their sense of right? But if the
questionable superiority has an existence, am I not called upon by
every dictate of true public spirit and good feeling to show that
superiority by striving to do what I have already spoken of—raise the
tone of my class, and lead it to higher aims and purer pleasures? Is
not that a nobler ambition than to content myself with rising above
my class—abandoning it to grovel in materialism, if not to wallow in
the mire? Do you know that Kingsley said teachers and preachers to the
rich and the poor were not wanting, but where was he who would go on a
mission to the lower middle and small trading classes, and reclaim them
from their special form of animalism and licence, “their irreverence
and undutifulness,” as you put it. Do you believe the Bible, Fan,
or do you hold that such injunctions as to preserve old landmarks
and not to forget our own and our father’s friends, are out-of-date
precepts—simply fit for Orientals?’
‘You are clever, Oliver,’ said Fan, coldly. ‘I cannot pretend to vie
with you in quotations misapplied.’
‘As the devil is great in texts—no, you don’t mean that,’ said Oliver,
trying to conjure back a friendly spirit into the dispute. He had
smoked his pipe and was knocking out its ashes. There was silence for
a time, and then he pointed out that the moon had risen unobserved
while they were speaking. It was flooding the landscape with a light
which, though it comes so often, never gives a familiar impression, but
always produces an effect wholly removed from that of ordinary light,
causing both heaven and earth to be changed for us, and to come out, in
their every aspect, a more solemn and grander sky, a sadder and fairer
world, than those we see by the beams of the sun.
Under the rays of the moon, the midsummer green of the Copley Grange
trees had grown dusky. They were massed together and cast deep shadows
over the turf, while the waters of the Brook flashed here and there
like silver by contrast. In the sky overhead the Pleiades were asking
who should bind their sweet influence? Orion the mighty hunter was
abroad. The Pole-star was glittering with his special effulgence.
‘How small those lamps up yonder, whose oil has never failed since
the creation, make a poor beggar and skirmisher of a day feel!’ said
Oliver, suddenly. ‘One would not say, either, that they disdain the
humanity they have given light to throughout the centuries. I am
not sure whether Friarton Mill is not jollier by moonlight than by
daylight. If all you said were true, Fan, what a compensation the
beauty of this place might still prove! I defy you to say that in one
respect, and that of all save the first importance, the lines have not
fallen to us in pleasant places.’
But she would not be appeased. Nature was not to her at any time what
it was to him; at this moment the perfection of the scene before her,
hurt her afresh, like a taunt added to a blow. ‘You will make me hate
this place,’ she cried reproachfully; ‘you will make me wish I had
never seen this house which was father’s house, where I have lived the
most of my life.’
He was sorry for her pain, but he was also disappointed and wounded at
her utter want of sympathy with him. ‘You have one resource left you,’
he said, with some hardness, which had not been there before, stealing
into his tone. ‘You can go away and leave me and the mill. My father
made sufficient provision for you, to enable you to act as you like,
and I will do all in my power——’
She interrupted him, turning upon him with a passionate protest. ‘Do
you think I could do it? Do you think I would leave you alone to bear
the penalty, though it may be of your own incurring? What do you take
me for? You do not know me, Oliver.’
‘That may very well be, since I do not believe your know yourself,’ said
Oliver, with a shrug. ‘But I am obliged to you, all the same, for your
magnanimity.’ He was really touched by her womanly love and constancy,
though he had been too much provoked to show it.
‘There is one question I am entitled to ask you,’ said Fan, more
calmly. ‘You admit you did not always mean to sink into a tradesman. I
know you had very different ideas when you went first to Oxford. What
changed you?’
He hesitated and did not speak for a moment. He did not deny her right
to put the question, but he did not know how to answer it. In many
things which related to his words and acts, he was by disposition a
frank and open-hearted man, but in proportion to his general frankness
were his particular reserves. He had sacred secrets which had to do
with convictions, feelings, and principles. He could no more turn his
nature inside out to his dearest friend where these were concerned than
he could consciously practise self-deception and social hypocrisy.
He was even shy with himself in dealing with the deep things of his
spirit. Still he owed some explanation to Fan, who had been the happy
confidant of the early dreams which had passed away like the morning
mist, and who now stood there in such estrangement from him.
‘Oh! all sorts of arguments came in and did their work,’ he said at
last, a little vaguely. ‘Some familiarity with learning bred the usual
contempt, I dare say. I was only her valet, and so she ceased to be
a heroine to me. I have grown a good deal older and wiser—let us hope
to begin with—and—well there was one affair which made a considerable
impression upon me at the time that I can speak of to you. There are
plenty of tradesmen’s sons who find their way to Oxford, but there was
just one other baker’s son who got there with me. He or his friends
for him made a grand mistake in somehow procuring his admission, under
false colours possibly, into a notably aristocratic college. I don’t
suppose his people had any very honourable aim in sending him to
college at all, at least he himself was a vain, weak fellow who thought
chiefly of acquiring associates—whom he called friends, in a rank of
life far above his own. I have no doubt he intended to cut the baking
trade entirely when he left Oxford, and that he hoped by means of his
fellow-Oxonians to hoist himself into polite society. For that end he
was willing to make himself generally obliging and useful, poor beggar,
to his temporary companions. He would help and back them in their money
transactions, cater for their entertainment, and bear more than his
share of the brunt of their scrapes.
‘That was to be the great business of his college life—with the
securing of a high connection for its end—not a very heroic end,
eh, Fan? But, to do him justice, he had no more natural turn for
study in any shape—classics, history, philosophy, or philology, than
nineteen out of twenty of his chosen patrons had developed in their
more favourable circumstances, or than had been shown by the whole of
his father’s journeymen bakers with their adverse surroundings. But,
there was not any more harm in him than being the wrong man in the
wrong place, which is not a very uncommon or heinous transgression,
though being that, he was a mean little flunkey. But the fault was not
altogether his, and he was good-natured and soft-hearted; though he was
idle, I never heard he was vicious. They said afterwards that he was
liked in his native town, and had been a good son and brother.
‘The fact of his father’s disgraceful trade had been kept in strict
concealment, and did not come out for some time. But when it did,
the enormity of the offence—though one would say that most people
are personally indebted to bakers who mind their business—together
with the low deceit of the concealment, proved far too much for any
poor popularity Tom Neaves had attained. The fellows he was amongst
could not get over the “rank impudence” of his intrusion into their
college, yet I should not wonder though they imagined they admired
Thackeray—“Less of a cad, you know, than Dickens”—and knew something
about George Osborne and “Figs.” They judged Neaves deserved to be
punished, and they sat upon him to give him his deserts, and above all
to get rid of him, as the officers of a crack regiment sometimes agree
to compel a wretched subaltern who is not of their set, and so is not
fit for their mess, to exchange or sell out. Of course in both cases
the affair is so managed as not to attract the attention or force the
interference either of a superior officer or a dean, and only what
are considered legitimate weapons are used against the common enemy.
Mind, Fan, I do not pretend that Neaves was without blame; and I am
perfectly aware that the young fellows who led the attack against
him, in their very contempt, did it more in thoughtlessness than in
malice. A few of them dropped his acquaintance summarily, as they were
perfectly at liberty to do. But the greater number settled to make him
their butt till he should endure it no longer. They assailed him with
a perpetual storm of allusions to his origin and practical jokes on
his father’s trade. They inquired gravely his opinion on dinner rolls.
They smuggled loaves into his gown. They showered as much flour upon
him from the windows of their rooms when he crossed the quad as ever
was scattered from a costermonger’s cart on a Derby day, or a Roman
balcony during the carnival. No doubt the wit of these gentlemen was
not very high-bred or unique in its expression; but what was lacking
in brilliance was made up in energy—the energy of a pack of boys, of
undergraduates—in teasing and tormenting their victim. Of course, if
Neaves had possessed sense and spirit he would not have minded a straw,
or he would have returned the aggressors scorn for scorn—if he had
not risen to the height of repaying them good for evil—and possibly
brought them to a more rational frame of mind. But unfortunately sense
and spirit were just the qualities in which poor Neaves was lamentably
deficient. He had already proved himself, as I have told you, a silly,
weak fellow, mortally ashamed of his father’s honest calling; therefore
his assailants hit him on the tenderest point, and had him at their
mercy. He struggled against the persecution for some time, tried to
behave as if he did not see it, then blustered a little, then knocked
under. To think such gnat-bites could drive a fellow with a soul in him
beside himself! They did; therefore his body was found floating in the
Isis one fine morning, down among the boats, not far from a place where
he had once, after his boat had bumped another boat, given a sort of
pic-nic, and boasted that the greatest ‘nobs’ of his college—the wild
younger son of a duke and an out-at-elbows young viscount—had been his
supporters. There was some confusion in the wording of the telegram
which broke the catastrophe to old Neaves. The family clung to the idea
that though an accident had happened, and their Tom was the sufferer,
he might still be alive. So the mother hurried to the spot along with
the father.
‘I chanced to see them after they had been told the worst and were
starting for home again to warn the rest of their children of what
was coming. The old man did not show what he felt, but the mother——I
tell you, Fan, every jury in the kingdom would, with justice, have
exonerated the perpetrators of the mischief from even so much guilt
as manslaughter, though one of them—I need not say he was not a
ringleader—took the misfortune so much to heart that he had to be
removed from Oxford to save his reason——and to this day when that
woman’s face comes into my mind, I think as I did then, I would rather
have been the wretched simpleton in his coffin than those men in the
flush of their youth and strength and whatever goodly birthright they
claimed besides. By Heavens, Fan,’ protested Oliver, in the passion
which had been gathering during his story, ‘what these fellows did was
the farthest removed from the chivalrous courtesy which was once held
to constitute gentle bearing, it was the grossest example of caddish
behaviour I ever came across.’
Fan was scared by the ghastly ludicrousness and grievous pathos of the
story, and by the degree to which Oliver was moved in telling it. She
had never seen him in his grief for the loss of their father betray so
much emotion as he did now, when he grew pale in the moonlight with
the violence of his anger, and clenched his teeth in the height of his
reprobation and disgust. ‘It was very cruel, very ungenerous,’ said
Fan, with a kind of shivering recoil. She crept close to her brother
and clasped his arm with her two hands, clinging to him. ‘They never
treated you so, dear?’ she asked with a gasp, as if seeking to reassure
herself.
‘Not they,’ he said with an awkward laugh, half ashamed of his
excitement. ‘My college was not quite so exclusive, and I trust I was
made of sterner stuff. If the men had chaffed me with a miff-wheel or
a rolling-pin, I should have replied, Yes, these were my arms, and I
did not see that something might not be said for them as well as for a
pair of wild men of the woods, a Moor’s head, a pirate’s ship, or an
assassin’s dagger. The gist of the matter is that if I lost some of my
ideals at Oxford I found others to replace them. Let us be thankful.
Come along, Fan; the dew has done falling, indeed, but I am keeping you
out far too late with only that rag of a handkerchief over your head.’
CHAPTER VI.
LOUISA AND CATHERINE HILLIARD.
‘YOUR settling down here as a tradesman, Oliver, will be a nice story
for Mrs. Hilliard and Catherine,’ said Fan Constable, tartly, over
the breakfast-table next morning. For Fan was by no means permanently
converted, however touched for the moment, by the last evening’s
conversation.
Oliver shook himself with some vigour, but the gesture was so common
with him as not necessarily to imply any special depth of feeling
stirred by the observation; however, his colour rose as he spoke in
answer.
‘What will Mrs. Hilliard and Catherine make of it? what can it be
to them? At the same time Mrs. Hilliard puts little weight on social
distinctions; you must do her the justice to grant that, Fan,’ he
said, looking straight across the table to his sister, and speaking
with a degree of emphasis which implied that, in his opinion, Fan was
not in the habit of judging righteous judgment where Mrs. Hilliard was
concerned. ‘As for Catherine,’ he added, after a moment’s pause, ‘I
imagine she is too much in the clouds, as usual, to take much notice of
what happens on the common earth.’ He said the words with an attempt at
carelessness, but in reality he spoke with an effort, stiffly.
‘Oh, it may suit Louisa Hilliard to profess that she is indifferent
to public opinion and independent of it, that she is a privileged,
irresponsible person, in short. But you are greatly mistaken if you
think you will escape her gibing tongue and impertinent laughter.
And you will find to your cost that when the matter is of the least
importance she will take care to comply with the world’s standard.’
‘I don’t wish to stand between any genial soul and her jest,’ said
Oliver; ‘and I am sure, Fan, you need not quarrel with respect for
social standards.’
‘I don’t quarrel with it,’ said Fan, decidedly. ‘I think that whatever
the social standards of the past may have been, social standards in our
day ought in the main to be deferred to by all sensible people. What I
object to, naturally, is that you should insist on running counter to
them in order to indulge in a wild dream.’
‘I plead guilty,’ said Oliver.
‘As for Catherine Hilliard,’ Fan went on, ‘she is not too much “in the
clouds,” as you call it, to prevent her coming down among ordinary
people and saying very stinging sarcastic things. Louisa is only too
well content with herself and her belongings; but I think Catherine
Hilliard is a discontented girl.’
‘The level of “a low content,”’ muttered Oliver, gratifying his
father’s old, half-blind, half-deaf English terrier ‘Ned’ with a
sardine.
Fan did not catch the quotation, or notice the typical act: she was
leaping to a conclusion. ‘Catherine Hilliard is so dissatisfied with
herself and everything around her, that I fancy she will learn to
welcome any change of circumstances, until she may get the length of
selling herself and her feelings some day. Then, no doubt, after the
bargain is completed, she will turn round and decide that this gain
also is not worth a tithe of what she has paid for it.’
‘You have no right to speak so, Fan,’ said Oliver angrily. ‘Of course,
I don’t pretend to guess how Catherine Hilliard may dispose of
herself,’ he went on more calmly; ‘but she has always appeared to me
a kind of nineteenth-century vestal virgin, a “Christian priestess of
Nature” and such letters and art as have come in her way. That is not
the sort of creature who sells herself.’
‘I beg your pardon, Oliver.’ Fan contradicted her brother with mingled
dignity and obstinacy.
‘And I beg your pardon, Fan.’ Oliver perpetrated with considerable
success a mimicry of his sister’s manner.
‘There,’ he said quickly, ‘as you are always tempted to be unfair to
the Hilliards, we had better let the subject drop.’
Fan did not protest against the charge of unfairness, or insist on
prolonging the discussion. Perhaps her conscience pricked her a
little. She was perfectly sensible in the truthfulness of her nature
that Louisa Hilliard was her _bête noire_. Fan used to say to herself
without disguise, ‘I can’t bear Louisa Hilliard.’
This was one of the instances of natural antipathy and comparatively
causeless dislike, which, like the opposite examples of instinctive
partiality, and hardly warranted attachment, were apt to hold sway
over Fan Constable’s ardent, concentrated temperament. Hers was not
an unjust or undisciplined character, while it was loyal to the core;
but it was full of ‘likes and dislikes.’ There was nothing lymphatic
or volatile about Fan, to her great loss of ease and tranquillity. If
she had been put under an examination as to the provocation she had
received from Mrs. Hilliard, who was Fan’s remote kinswoman and early
patroness, Fan could not have given any save the pettiest reasons of
which she herself would have been the first to feel ashamed. Yet her
asperity where this woman was concerned amounted to rancour. Sometimes
the sentiment in her own bosom struck Fan as unchristian, and being
very sincere in her Christianity, she sought to qualify her enmity by
solemnly assuring herself of what was the truth—that she would not
injure Louisa Hilliard for the world. It was only incidentally that
Catherine Hilliard came in for her share of the dislike which Fan had
to Catherine’s cousin. The two younger women possessed nothing in
common, but neither had they any sharp points of antagonism. If it had
not been for Fan Constable’s extraordinary aversion to Mrs. Hilliard,
Fan would have viewed Catherine Hilliard with simple indifference.
Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin kept house together, chiefly upon Mrs.
Hilliard’s income, at the ‘Meadows,’ which was at once the largest,
and, though it sounds a contradiction, the cosiest, certainly the
prettiest, of the villas which had sprung up on the outskirts of
Friarton. The ‘Meadows,’ in fact, was more of a small country house
than a villa. It entitled its occupant, unless she were a very
objectionable person otherwise, to revolve in the first of the social
circles—which, like the sap-rings in the trunk of a tree, divided the
townspeople into various grades of enclosure. Nay, the ‘Meadows’
entitled its owner to hover on the verge, which she crossed not
infrequently, of the county families.
For Mrs. Hilliard was only objectionable in possessing a carelessness
of mind—a rather pronounced Bohemianism. She was regardless of who
took her up or who let her down, which had an effect the reverse
of what some people might have expected. As she was also a lively
agreeable woman, superficially refined, a well-endowed, comely widow
of thirty-five years of age, who relished her freedom too keenly to
have any thought of marrying again, but who kept a pleasant house and
welcomed her friends to it, she was lifted clean above the ebb and
flow of social fickleness; she was landed in established popularity
with _carte blanche_ to do very much as she pleased, and fill up her
visiting-list just as she chose.
In fact, Mrs. Hilliard’s house was what the vicarage often is in
country society, a sort of neutral ground and meeting place for
different classes—or degrees of classes, in the community—not that its
mistress would descend so far as to receive ordinary tradespeople and
fraternise with them, Fan now reflected, gloomily. Yet Mrs. Hilliard
had opened her doors to the brother and sister since they were a mere
boy and girl, and had in her turn visited at Friarton Mill. And she had
not come exactly as the Fremantles and Wrights, the dignitaries of the
Grammar School, had come, because the mill family, so far as it had to
do with Oliver, might be regarded as in a transition state, and on the
point of taking flight into higher regions; but because Mrs. Hilliard,
though a well-born, well-married woman, the daughter of a rural dean
and the widow of a commodore, was really distantly related to the
Constables through their mother. Mrs. Constable, as Fan never forgot,
had been the daughter of a clergyman, not a dissenting minister but
a regular parson of the Church of England. But, after all, there
are clergymen and clergymen even of the Church of England. The poor
curate who had been Mrs. Constable’s father had lived and died in very
different circumstances from those of the comfortably situated rural
dean to whom Mrs. Hilliard had owed allegiance. The curate, to begin
with, had stooped and married the daughter of a yeoman, who on his part
had not enjoyed any of the plain plenty apt to be associated with a
great farmhouse. Accordingly, the curate’s brood of children had been
brought up in a spare as well as homely fashion, until they had been
sent out into the world to earn their living, and make their own way,
as clerks and nursery governesses; one of those governesses, with her
limited education and still more limited earnings—not to be compared to
a good cook’s wages—was found not unwilling to exchange her anxious
dependence and drudgery for the serene independence and importance, in
her own sphere, of the mistress of Friarton Mill. Strange to say, the
fact of the slight tie of blood between the two women failed to prevent
Mrs. Hilliard from settling at Friarton when the Meadows offered itself
to her and her man of business—at once as a good investment for her
spare money and a suitable house which she could make a home.
Stranger still to relate, Mrs. Hilliard was too secure of her position,
and too defiant of censure, to ignore for a moment the thread of
relationship between herself and the Constables of Friarton Mill. On
the contrary, she proclaimed it openly with evident cold blood whenever
she had occasion to do so, compelling confidence and respect in her
hearers. For if Mrs. Hilliard could afford to make light of, nay, to
sport, her far-away cousinship to the family of a provincial miller and
baker, her acquaintances might rest on the conviction that she had
substantial claims on their regard in much closer alliance with the
families in canons’ houses in cathedral closes, in government houses
abroad, in pleasant little houses near Hyde Park or at Kensington. But
in reality the eccentricity belonged rather to the idiosyncrasy of the
woman than to the remoteness of the relationship which she elected to
count with the Constables.
Mrs. Hilliard had been ready to hold out her hand to the Constable
young people, which was one of the offences Fan, though she could not
dispense with the hand, had not been able to forgive. This was not pure
perversity and ingratitude in Fan Constable. It was the result of the
observation that Mrs. Hilliard laughed, without taking the trouble to
conceal it, at Fan’s serious pretensions, and that the older woman was
as little, as the younger was much, in earnest.
The Meadows was a wide white house, cheerful in its whiteness, and,
at the same time, amply shaded and sheltered by old and luxuriant
shrubberies, of which the Portugal laurels, Irish yews and hollies were
giants of their kind, while the lilacs, Guelder roses, and syringas
offered, in their season, pyramids, piles, and thickets of flowers.
The public rooms were all on the ground floor; and, in the case of the
drawing-room, the long French windows, which faced the south, opened
to the lawn with its clumps of rhododendrons and brakes of thorns,
and its glimpse in mid distance, through an archway of roses, of the
flower-garden.
The drawing-room at the Meadows was the sunniest, most cheerful room in
a house the great distinction of which was resolute, sometimes slightly
overpowering, social sunshine and cheerfulness. Mrs. Hilliard used to
call it an ‘Omnium Gatherum,’ a flagrant instance of eclecticism where
rooms were concerned. Its furniture, and the occupations she engaged
in there, did not date beyond her own reign at the Meadows, and so
would have been pronounced worthless by connoisseurs. But, as Mrs.
Hilliard maintained, she had lived long enough to have seen several
styles of decoration and ladies’ work, and her drawing-room proved with
what catholicity of spirit she had ‘gone in’ for each in succession.
The only drawback was that she could not make up her mind to be
entirely off with the old love in order to be on with the new. Thus she
sacrificed the great aim of the last exposition of high art—unity, to
her unprincipled softness of heart and lack of sternness of purpose.
She retained the cold whiteness and pompous glitter of the upper part
of her walls, and the undue warmth of colouring and floweriness of
her carpets—attempting to combine them with dirty orange dados and
sage-green _portières_, just as she kept the faded gorgeousness of
her Berlin woolwork in stripes of bold embroidery divided by bands of
imperial purple and emerald-green velvet, or in great groups of Queen
of Sheba flowers like the exuberant flower-pieces of Flemish painters,
introduced into close contact with the dim, delicate conventionalities
and studiously faint, long-drawn-out effects of nineteenth-century,
art needlework. It was a highly objectionable compromise from an
artistic point of view, but somehow it was not only saved from absolute
frightfulness, to a Philistine it had a charm of its own, because of
its little bit of mellowed, blended life—such as one may occasionally
meet with, on a grand scale, in a pile of building which began by being
a feudal castle, and went on to be an old English manor-house, then
progressed into a Georgian mansion, ending by proving the many-sided
home of a race. So time with lingering fingers had toned down and
tempered the robust gaudiness of the abused Berlin woolwork till it too
had acquired something of the exquisitely soft harmonies of ancient
tapestry. That was Catherine Hilliard’s opinion, and she had a fine
eye for colour. The chairs and tables, the books, the pictures and the
china in the room, were all about as incongruous, and yet all in a
manner represented some phase and echo of human life, and had come to
fit into each other.
So much could hardly be said with regard to Catherine Hilliard and her
surroundings, as she stood listlessly looking out of one of the long
windows on the lengthening shadows falling across the lilac flowers of
the rhododendrons, and waiting for her cousin coming in to afternoon
tea. It might be because Catherine belonged to all time that she did
not belong particularly to that room—in which, however, the window
where she stood with its round table, heap of books, letter-case and
blotting-book, work-basket, and Nankin jar holding a bunch of purple
and pink and white pea-blossoms, constituted Catherine’s sanctum and
private properties.
Catherine Hilliard was a young orphan cousin of Louisa Hilliard’s,
who, when she left school with a bare competence, had been invited by
the mistress of the Meadows to share her establishment. Catherine had
accepted the invitation on the stipulation that, in proportion to her
more slender means, she should pay her share of the joint housekeeping.
‘Catherine is such a dragon of pride for a young girl,’ Mrs. Hilliard
explained to anyone who had a right to be made acquainted with the
details of the arrangement, ‘that I dared not propose to her to come
and live with me and let me keep house for both. Yet she might have
the sense to guess that her company is a boon to me, though she has
little sympathy with my pottering commonplace ways, and lives in an
intellectual world of her own. It is my single regret with regard
to Catherine that she is a bit of a blue stocking.’ But though Mrs.
Hilliard professed and half persuaded herself to believe the contrary,
in reality she neither objected to Catherine’s contribution to the
general expenses nor to the different line she took in society. Mrs.
Hilliard’s hand was not so open that it had not its seasons and
occasions of closing, and she did not care to run the risk, slight
though it might be, of a rival in her special field.
Altogether the arrangement, which had continued from the time that
Catherine Hilliard was eighteen, up to the present date when she was
in her twenty-third year, had answered admirably. Mrs. Hilliard was
the reverse of exacting, and she was even forbearing and indulgent
where Catherine’s dissimilar tastes and habits were concerned. On
Catherine’s side she was not so ignorant and abstracted in her want of
knowledge of human nature and absorption in her own pursuits, as to be
unaware how much colder and more forlorn a place the world would have
proved to her, if Mrs. Hilliard had forgotten their cousinship and had
not extended to the girl an older woman’s friendly protection, and
given her a home with a member of her kindred. Catherine cherished
in silence and reserve sentiments of gratitude and affection for her
cousin Louisa, and was a good deal more under her influence than could
easily have been supposed. But there was a hitch—what miners call
‘a fault’—between Catherine and ordinary humanity, the consequences
of which were so plain that Fan Constable, who was not in the other
girl’s confidence, could read them though she could not trace them to
their source. Without near ties, without clear, positive duties—apart
from the obligation to keep the ten commandments and lead what she
understood of a Christian life, Catherine Hilliard was thrown back
and in upon herself, which, unless as a discipline to teach her how
insufficient she was for any achievement she really valued, seemed
about the worst experience she could have encountered. She was like a
plant withdrawn from the wholesome, common, out-of-door influences
of sun, rain, wind, and a touch of frost, while the plant is at the
same time subjected in one part of its cellular tissue to the strain
of over-stimulus and over-cultivation. Though Catherine lived in a
house full of lively movement, with many comers and goers, though
she was on excellent terms with the house’s mistress and its circle
or circles, the girl remained always like an unfamiliar visitor in
what served her for a home. She was only in, not of, its circles.
Catherine’s was largely an inner world of fancy and feeling; its
scenes furnished by the vivid representations which she drew in her
mind, of places and incidents met with in her books; its characters,
ideal personages, ghosts and shades—goodly ghosts and heroic shades,
no doubt, but destitute of the substantiality and warmth, and what is
salutary even in the provoking contradictions, the piteous failures,
the tough warfare of flesh and blood. There was a certain bloodlessness
and fantasticalness about Catherine’s world, amidst much that was
noble and sweet in it. She had an aching consciousness of a hollow
emptiness about it, and not of a gaping void alone, but of a harsh
discord between it and the actual world. She felt herself getting more
and more fastidious and captious and—she feared—horribly selfish. She
moped a good deal, as well as mused. She dreaded instinctively she
knew not what, as the result of her star-gazing and hero-worship.
She was conscious she shrank from the common work-a-day world and
from the vulgar and mean interests—often, of ordinary people with
the common business of life on their hands. But she did not know in
the least how to give up her habits, or reconcile herself to society
as she found it. She was helpless in the bondage she had made for
herself—yet she was frequently more weary and disgusted with herself
than she could possibly be with any other person. But Catherine had
one great resource against morbidness, though she repaired to it as
to other occupations, either listlessly, or with a fitfulness in her
temporary eagerness, resorting to it with no distinct comprehension of
what a safeguard it was to her, from the consequences of the continual
exercise of those faculties which were already over-wrought.
Catherine was exceedingly fond of animals, and she happened to be
free to express her fondness, since she was not merely the mistress
of half-a-dozen pets of her own, she was the sovereign protector
of the whole animal kingdom as it existed at the Meadows. She was
likewise the head-gardener on the spot. For Mrs. Hilliard had nimbly
seized the opportunity of a floricultural tyrant’s throwing up his
good situation, in a fit of pique, to get rid of her hired oppressor
permanently. She had then vested in Catherine supreme authority over
a junior gardener and a boy who were well broken in to obedience.
The only obligation which Mrs. Hilliard had imposed on her cousin was
that she should not indulge her predilection for Shakespearian flowers
in the beds, and untrimmed luxuriance in the shrubbery, to the extent
of banishing every choice pelargonium and perfectly quilled dahlia,
which had formerly crowned Mrs. Hilliard with honour at flower-shows;
neither should Catherine be guilty of corrupting her subordinates to
the degree of reducing the grounds to the picturesquely disorderly
level of the gardens of a French or Italian country house, so ruining
the established reputation of the Meadows for the trimness which is the
English gardener’s delight.
Catherine, always overwhelmed as she was, not with bracing work,
but with a dreary surplus of vacant time on her hands, in spite of
her reading, was fortunately capable of revelling, in her desultory
fashion, in this double resource. She would leave Dante in the saddest
region of the Inferno, the Jungfrau when the Black Knight had her
at last, Mary Barton pursuing the outward-bound ship, Janet in the
agony of her repentance, to take refuge in her own section of the
living world. She would play for half-an-hour with Pepper and Crab
or the youngest kitten. She would watch the eight rooks whose big,
black-coated presence always seemed to Catherine to lend a solid
dignity to the fry of small birds, just as the rooks’ deep cawing
supplied a solemn diapason to the lighter music of the orchestra in
the shrubbery on a bright morning in spring, or a quiet evening in
early summer. Catherine stoutly maintained the innocence of the rooks
against the respectful representations of the modest under-gardener,
that the birds did not confine their bill of fare to worms and the
wide genus grub, as she was fain to assert. And after all, the alleged
depredations committed by the rooks, were as nothing to the frightful
accusations brought against a pair of demure sinners of Cushat doves,
which were like the apple of Catherine’s eye, for whose condescension
in coming of their own sweet will and building a nest in an old Scotch
fir, and their affability in indulging in soft cooings, she could never
be sufficiently grateful. Catherine scouted the idea of replacing the
wild pigeons by a couple of their tame kindred, which should be housed
in a neat little pigeon-house, submit to be fed with grain and crumbs
from feasts, or fly far a-field for their meals instead of proceeding
with the marauding instincts of the most incorrigible of thieves, and
alas! in spite of their sleek, iridescent plumage, and the tender
sentiment associated with them, of the greediest feeders belonging to
the feathered tribes, to devastate whole rows of newly-sown peas and
‘breaks’ of young cauliflowers.
What did Catherine care for peas and cauliflowers compared to her
Cushat doves? But Mrs. Hilliard, though she found some food for
laughter in the doves’ exploits and Catherine’s dismay, was not so
indifferent to the wreck of her vegetables. Catherine was very much
obliged to Oliver Constable for telling her, though it was in a
measure another disillusion in the way the information was put, that
wood-pigeons were the most arrant cowards in addition to being the most
disgraceful thieves, for the most transparent sham—the least life-like
scarecrow—sufficed to hold the robbers at bay.
Catherine was as well acquainted with every bird’s nest within her
bounds as were the Friarton boys, whom she could not keep out of the
shrubbery in the bird-nesting season, and whom she detested with an
illogical detestation—to say the least, enough to show that she had
never had a brother. She would suddenly start out on these boys from a
little wilderness of green branches, and assail them with a torrent
of passionate reproach. The boys would stare blankly at the apparition
they had aroused, but any unwonted bashfulness, if excited at all,
would speedily give way to a sense of the utter disproportion between
cause and effect. The result would be an ironical titter or guffaw
(for the Friarton boys were by no means models of good manners), and
a noisy, careless retreat to be followed by a return rendered doubly
certain by Catherine’s injudicious challenge.
Catherine retreated too, covered with swift mortification for her
extravagant anger. But it was difficult to be patient with those young
savages, who could no more be barred out than the waves of the sea
could be held back, who would make short work in one holiday afternoon
of all those exquisite little homes of moss and leaves, leaving the
poor, fond, helpless architects fluttering in despair round their
ruined dwellings and pillaged treasures of blue, green, black and
red spotted, and freckled eggs, or, more precious still, downy,
yellow-beaked, tottering, gaping fledglings. The nests were perfectly
beautiful and sacred to Catherine, and she took great pleasure in
visiting them all round every morning, with elaborate precautions
not to disturb family arrangements or trouble heads of houses in the
performance of their duties.
Catherine was almost as happy and much less liable to worry, among
her lilies, of which she cultivated an infinite variety; her trailing
love-lies-bleeding, like a warrior’s plumes heavy and drooping with
the red stains of battle; the golden shields, with the dark discs and
the stiff grenadier stalks, of her sunflowers; the pinked perfection
and spicy breath of her clove carnations. She would hang over each
of them, and touch them with a lingering, fondling touch, as if they
were sentient creatures, and could welcome and respond to a friendly
caress. She hated to shorten their brief blossoming time; she would
never gather them with lavish wastefulness. She liked to have them near
her at all times, and so would take a tribute from their abundance to
‘busk’ her person and the Meadows drawing-room, but she never did it
unsparingly and recklessly.
Catherine Hilliard was of the middle size, but looked taller than she
was from the slenderness of her figure. Her hair was of that dubious
colour which enemies called red, friends auburn, and gushing admirers
golden. In reality it was each tint as the light fell on its simple
braids and twists. Her complexion was fair and pale—too waxen, in
spite of her bird-herding and gardening, for perfect health. Her nose,
mouth, and chin were well and softly moulded. But the results of her
temperament and circumstances were visible in her personal appearance.
There was a languor which had no vital purpose to conquer it, evident
in her air, that threatened to drain away the last remnant of what
ought to have been the healthy hope and joyousness of her years. Her
mouth had a sensitive, plaintive droop. The expression of her eyes
varied continually from hesitating dreaminess to spasmodic enthusiasm,
from short-lived enthusiasm to intolerant scorn, from quick scorn to
morbid depression. The beauty of Catherine Hilliard’s face, as it
struck strangers, dwelt principally in the dark blue of her eyes.
Withal, she was by no means strictly beautiful, only endowed with a
peculiar charm for those on whom the charm worked at all. She had a
fancy for gowns of thin material, in their season, like summer clouds
floating round or clinging to her, according to the atmosphere, in the
dry heat of noon, or in the slight dankness of the dew point. But she
preferred the colour of her gowns to be softly dark like the clouds
after sunset, thus instinctively rather than deliberately setting
off the fair paleness of her complexion. She kept her cousin Louisa
marvelling where Catherine could find so many misty purples, heather
browns, and cool slate colours, as well as naval blues, of a wire-woven
texture. Catherine wore a gauzy gown of a deep plum-colour at this
moment.
CHAPTER VII.
HOW MRS. HILLIARD AND CATHERINE JUDGED THE LAST SAINT GEORGE OF
FRIARTON.
AT last Mrs. Hilliard came briskly into the room still wearing her
hat. She could not, although she had tried, have walked otherwise than
briskly; and if she had been a duchess, her buxom and florid good
looks, a little overblown, would still have recalled a dairy-maid.
But as Mrs. Hilliard was perfectly aware of the association, and,
instead of attempting to smother it by all lawful and unlawful means,
faced it courageously and acknowledged it openly, she succeeded in
surmounting it; by not pretending to be what she was not, she remained
herself in all essentials. She looked what she had always been—a lady
in spite of excessive plumpness, a decided inclination to redness,
and an exuberant, lasting elasticity and quickness of carriage and
step—the reverse of Catherine’s listlessness—which would have been
more becoming in early youth, and which had small connection with the
sober-mindedness, not to say the stateliness and dignity, of mature
years.
The only sensitiveness which Mrs. Hilliard betrayed as to her personal
style, was that while she was by implication resigned to, nay,
reasonably consoled for, the death of her husband, whom she had married
after the shortest of wooings, and of whom she had not seen much during
their brief married life, she continued faithful to her widow’s black,
though it was twelve years since she had been a wife. At the same
time she could not get over her cousin’s eccentricity of taste when
Catherine could have fluttered so fitly, in every respect, in white or
in the palest of pinks, blues, or primroses. For a girl to be addicted
to sobriety in anything, before her time, was incomprehensible to
Louisa Hilliard, save in the light of affectation, if not hypocrisy, on
the girl’s part. But though Mrs. Hilliard did not believe much in most
people—young or old, she had still faith in Catherine’s odd childish
simplicity.
‘Have I kept you long waiting, my dear?’ asked Mrs. Hilliard as she
subsided, buoyantly still, into her own low chair, and, untying her
hat, tilted it unceremoniously, for greater coolness, on the back of
her profuse brown hair. Her action made conspicuous, what was a marked
feature in her round face, the great expanse of white forehead—round
like the face itself, and big enough to have been, so far as size
was concerned, the forehead of a sage, but so flat and smooth that,
gazing on it, one felt tempted to doubt the fact of which there was no
question, that Mrs. Hilliard represented a woman of rather more than
ordinary intelligence.
‘Not very long,’ answered Catherine, with her slow, absent-minded mode
of speech, dawdling as she spoke across the floor; ‘and though you had,
you know it would not have signified,’ she added indifferently.
‘It always signifies if one interferes with another person’s comfort,’
said Mrs. Hilliard, lightly; ‘only you are too young to understand the
value of that jewel of an English word, and I am bringing my excuse in
my afternoon’s budget, Catherine.’
In their familiar household intercourse Mrs. Hilliard never abbreviated
her cousin’s name, or played affectionate or mischievous tricks with
it. This was not because Mrs. Hilliard was in the least like either of
those dignitaries Fan Constable or the Vicar of Wakefield, who loved
to be particular, who might choose to revenge themselves nobly on the
base liberties taken, doubtless, with each in turn, when they were
addressed as ‘Fan’ and ‘Dr. Prim.’
Mrs. Hilliard asserted that Catherine was ‘Catherine’ like her namesake
of Sienna, therefore the elder woman could not presume to call the
younger ‘Kate’ or ‘Kitty,’ though Mrs. Hilliard herself had never been
anything else to her intimates than ‘Loo’ or ‘Looey,’ unless ‘Tom’
sometimes in the days of her youth.
Mrs. Hilliard was in the habit of referring unblushingly, and with
a merry defiance of the contempt excited in the superior, highly
cultivated people who proclaimed themselves far above gossip, to
her diligence in collecting, and keenness in enjoying, the Friarton
news of the day. Catherine did not often appreciate, in themselves,
the promiscuous heaps of news cast down at her feet, for her to pick
and choose from without much trouble on her part. But she did set
wistful store on the merry heart of the gatherer and scatterer, and
counted herself a dull girl by contrast. Not that Catherine was a dull
young woman to speak with, she was rather pungent in a quiet way, as
Fan Constable had described her. Yet with all her pungency she had a
singleheartedness and magnanimity of character, a speedy inclination
to own herself in the wrong, after speaking her mind, which generally
forced her inferiors to respect as well as to pity her, and to receive
her under their protection from the encroachments of others, even while
they were taking advantage of her themselves.
‘You won’t enquire what great event has happened,’ said Mrs. Hilliard,
hardly waiting till the servant had left the room.
‘I shall hear it presently,’ said Catherine composedly.
‘Then you shall have it _au naturel_, without any stuffing or
garnishing, to punish a great lazybones of a girl who will not so much
as get up a little curiosity to serve as a relish for my tit-bit.’
‘Too many cooks spoil the kale,’ said Catherine. ‘I should only waste
my small culinary talents by setting them up against yours.’
‘I am not going to punish myself, in order to keep you in suspense any
longer. I flatter myself, though you are a mouldy book-worm, you feel
an agony of suspense, whatever you may pretend. As for myself, I am
itching to create a sensation. Oliver Constable is going in for the
mill and bakehouse—what do you think of that? What an anti-climax to
Fan’s solemn gentility!’
‘Going in for the mill and bakehouse?’ repeated Catherine, vaguely.
‘My dear Catherine, you are getting as pedantically precise in your
English, and as stupid, as the rest of your clever people,’ protested
Mrs. Hilliard, with lively impatience. ‘Don’t tell me going in for a
thing is slang. Very soon, if you don’t take care, you will be mistaken
for a school-mistress. You will be as incapable as a senior wrangler
of speaking the language of ordinary life, or of taking in a simple
statement. Oliver Constable has come home from Oxford to be a miller
and baker, as old Peter Constable was before him—do you understand
that?’
‘Yes,’ said Catherine, with a faint smile. ‘What is your objection,
Louisa?’
‘Mine? I have none in the world. He may be the bellman or the
lamplighter—by-the-by, these are two far more romantic occupations than
what he has chosen—for me. I am rather obliged to him for making the
unexpected happen, because, though it always happens, according to Lord
Beaconsfield, still, somehow, it sets us talking, and talking—or shall
I call it gabbling—is my vocation.’
‘Don’t you find it tiresome?’ suggested Catherine, with odd _naïveté_.
‘To myself or other people?’ enquired Mrs. Hilliard, unmoved save for
the twinkle in her eyes. ‘I can vouch it does not tire me;’ and she
used her plump fingers French fashion to help herself to another lump
of sugar.
‘I suppose Oliver Constable cares more for making money than for
winning success in what is called a learned profession, and securing
a social position; that is all it comes to,’ said Catherine, with
a little sigh at the smallness of the sacrifice and the result
altogether. ‘I am not sure that he may not be right, from his point
of view, unless he were to “go in” (Louisa?) for great scholarship or
for travelling to the North or the South Pole. You see there are no
Eldorados or Asgards left for men to believe in, and go in search of
now. Oliver Constable is not a genius, to write an immortal book, or
paint a picture which will never be forgotten. I do not know that there
is anything so very much better for him to do than honestly add pound
to pound, and take his worldly pleasure by counting up his gains at the
year’s end.’
‘My love, what a Mammon-worshipping speech from you, of all people!’
‘But we don’t seem to be able to keep from worshipping Mammon,’ alleged
Catherine, wearily, ‘though we say and perhaps mean that we are
worshipping another god; and I am not at all clear that Mrs. Grundy is
a more respectable deity than Mammon.’
‘You can’t accuse me of paying homage at her shrine. But are you not
sorry for sister Fan? What was her ultimatum for Oliver? That he should
become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury, while she should be
Jock the Laird’s sister? What a descent, to be condemned to remain the
sister, as she was the daughter, of a well-to-do miller and baker!’
‘No, I am not sorry,’ said Catherine, with more animation than she had
yet shown, for there was a spice of short-lived indignation in the
tone. ‘If she could have no higher ambition for her brother than that
he should be a barrister or a rector—you know his rising to be so much
as a judge or a dean was hardly to be thought of—I have not a spark of
pity to spare for Fan Constable’s disappointment.’
‘You have very little pity to spare for anybody out of a book, it
appears to me,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, with cheerful absence of concern.
‘Your little foible is that you are extremely hard-hearted. I am not—at
least nobody can refuse to give me the credit of good nature. I am
really sorry for Fan in the collapse of the dream of her life, if she
would only believe me, and if she would not make herself so ridiculous
by her fixed determination to be a lady. Of course the determination
defeats itself. She is not and never will be a lady—conventionally,
though she is well enough in her irregular way, if she would relax her
resolution—which she will not do so that I must laugh or die,’ finished
Mrs. Hilliard, not looking like dying.
‘I had quite a different idea of Oliver Constable, however,’
said Catherine, returning voluntarily to the main thread of the
conversation, but not speaking as if this or any other baffled idea
mattered much. ‘I never thought him mercenary——’
‘Wait a little,’ interrupted Mrs. Hilliard, with unquenched vivacity;
‘my hero is not mercenary. He is the most disinterested, unselfish of
mortals, though he is a “sair saunt” to Fan. He has come back among
us as the self-appointed champion of the millers and advocate of the
bakers. He is to be the defender of the tradespeople—the last version
of St. George in Friarton.’
‘But who is harming the millers, or what need have the bakers of
an advocate?’ asked Catherine, in a puzzled tone. ‘I thought the
tradespeople here were particularly prosperous—much more so than any
other class. I am sure they are not deficient in a sense of their own
merits and in a capacity for bringing them into the foreground.’
‘I agree with you entirely. But I suppose their prosperity is their
bane in one sense, and that our taking them at their own word goes to
prove that we are a pair of would be, bloated aristocrats. But it is
a fact that I never go into Polley’s or Dadd’s shop without having
a distinct perception that Mrs. Polley and old and young Dadd are
thinking to themselves, “You need not look down on us; we are every bit
as good as you are. We have as early spring chickens and lamb on our
tables as you have on yours. We could buy you out any day” (and I dare
say they could, if the Meadows were to sell). “We know our place, so
far as being civil in return for your custom; but don’t try to turn up
your nose at us”—as if my nose would do anything save turn up—to her
Majesty the Queen on her throne in the House of Lords. Catherine, you
are aware of its infirmity?’ exclaimed Mrs. Hilliard, parenthetically,
tip-tilting the refractory member still farther with her middle finger
in the most comical manner. ‘“Don’t go to think of trampling _us_ under
your feet,” which, as Sairey Gamp used to say, “Betsy Prig will take
her Bible oath” is the last exercise she would seek to take for the
mere pleasure of the thing.’
Catherine was fain to laugh. ‘When I begged Mrs. Polley to keep her
errand-boy away from the shrubbery—away from the birds’ nests,’ the
girl chimed in—‘Mrs. Polley was quite rude. “You must really look after
him yourself, Miss,” she told me sharply; “he is my servant here, but
he is not answerable to me when he is out of the shop. Excuse me, but
it ain’t any call of mine to look after Mrs. Hilliard’s place. Let them
idle fellows of gardeners as are in her pay see to that, I have enough
to do with my business. You ladies would be the first to complain and
leave the shop if it were neglected.”’
‘There is something in that,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, candidly. ‘Indeed I
have had thoughts of giving up Polley’s, because, according to cook,
Mrs. Polley will not amend the error of her ways in the line of capers
and cloves. I have meditated making an experiment in the new shop near
the railway station, only I feared that, on the whole, I should be
worse served there. For Mrs. Polley, to give the woman her due, knows
her business, keeps a good article as a rule, and despises to ask an
absurd price for it. As for her “Britons never shall be slaves” tone,
it borders on the aggressive, but then it is the reverse of servility
and it is the echo of a highly esteemed patriotic song. I imagine
Oliver Constable will call it the expression of a fine independent
spirit.’
‘But what does Oliver Constable mean?’ repeated Catherine, looking
as she was apt to do sometimes, hopelessly mystified in spite of her
cleverness.
‘He means to regenerate the lower middle classes—to make all the
members ladies and gentlemen in spite of themselves. Young Dadd must
learn Greek, and carry Plato, instead of “Verdant Green” and “Mrs.
Brown at Margate,” in his coat-pocket, and dip into ancient philosophy
in the intervals of handling his shears or his yard measure, of cutting
off a yard of lace, and calculating how much cloth is required for the
present fashion in flounces. Mrs. Polley and her girls will attend
evening classes for the higher education of women, and trip you and
me up with an opinion on the tertiary formation, or the recently
discovered satellite of Neptune, when our small minds are full of bloom
raisins and Carolina rice.’
‘But I thought you said he was to identify himself with the millers and
bakers?’
‘That goes without saying, you little goose. Charity begins at home.’
‘But they will still be millers and bakers,’ hammered Catherine.
‘I should hope so. Let him make them what he likes, I trust he intends
to leave us our flour and bread, else we shall be in a bad way. For,
though the railway might bring us a supply from a distance, still we
should miss a little, our breakfast and dinner rolls. Even these would
be too heavy a price to pay for a young fanatic’s radicalism—is that
the proper name to call it, Catherine?’
‘I cannot tell,’ said Catherine, slowly, ‘but surely the thing itself
is wasted on millers and bakers and common tradespeople.’
The girl was not hard-hearted, as she had been called. Any social
arrogance which she expressed was more an acquired trick of thought and
speech than a calm persuasion. She was not a fool, yet she nourished
a vague impression that it might be a Christian, patriotic duty to
do something for the outcast and forlorn—that a troop of soldiers or
a crew of sailors called for care from their leaders; while she held
the notion that millers and bakers, with tradespeople in general,
even though they were convicted of gross self-indulgence, and that
coarse materialism which is the deadly enemy of a higher life—of all
spirituality, might very well be left to take care of themselves.
‘Will Oliver Constable’s mission have any success?’ Catherine
speculated, with mild, idle curiosity. ‘Will the great vulgar consent
to be refined?’
‘I should think not,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, decidedly. ‘If I were one
of them, I should hate to be poked up and enlightened. After all, I
have a strong suspicion I am one of them, with just an outer coating
of polish, the result of circumstances,’ Mrs. Hilliard announced
impenitently, with a keen perception of the fun of taking guilt to
herself.
It was like Catherine not to contradict the assertion beyond a certain
point.
‘You don’t speak fine language like one of the Miss Polleys, or run
away, after the fashion of some of the others, when they have come into
the shop in their morning deshabille, and are scared by the entrance
of a customer belonging to the upper ranks. You are not slovenly,
smart, and splendid by turns. You don’t giggle at every word and think
it witty to be rude to men, clenching your rudeness with an emphatic
“There!” as I have heard the Miss Polleys do when I have gone to their
shop with some of Reddock’s commissions on market-day. You don’t spend
your evenings sauntering up and down the street, or paying perpetual
visits to your cronies.’
‘But I am a very prosaic, commonplace person for all that,’ said Mrs.
Hilliard, demurely. ‘You are sensible I have no sympathy with high
heroics or “high faluting” of any kind—my nature is pitched in too
low a key. The rest is accident. You forget that I am twice as old as
the youngest Miss Polley—almost old enough to be her mother—not to
speak of the cares I have gone through. I have no occasion to walk
out after dinner, or shop-shutting, as it may be, since the whole
day is mine, and you must admit I make good use of the hours after
luncheon. I believe I am the best visitor in Friarton. Oliver Constable
ought to include me in his mission, or get up a private one for my
special benefit. It is not fair to my needs, it is impertinent to
the tradespeople, to omit me in his benevolent efforts. But perhaps
he would prefer to reform you, withdrawing you from your books
and converting you into a social animal with a due regard to your
neighbour’s welfare;’ as she spoke, Mrs. Hilliard glanced quickly at
Catherine, but the glance fell without effect like blank shot.
‘I don’t think he will trouble with either of us,’ said Catherine,
composedly. ‘We are not in trade, we should be wide of his mark.
Will he continue to come here? I mean, will he drop you from his
visiting-list, or will you drop him from yours?’
‘Oh dear no, not so far as I am concerned. I am not particular lest any
offence should come between the wind and my gentility, and my friends
know my Bohemian tendencies. My acquaintances are aware beforehand
of the risks they run in countenancing me. Besides, the Constables,
as everybody has heard, are blood relations of mine, and it does not
suit my pride to throw them over, though they were to take to highway
robbery, instead of grinding corn and baking bread, as they have done
all along,’ said Louisa Hilliard, raising her head with a genuinely
aristocratic movement, notwithstanding the shortness of her neck.
‘Then,’ she resumed in her usual tone, ‘I should lose the opportunity
of seeing Fan stiffening into stone and at the same time kindling into
a white heat before the bitter draught she has to swallow. And when
all is said, Oliver Constable cannot get rid of the rather important
items that he has been bred a university man, and has succeeded to a
considerable patrimony, even though he should be eccentric enough to
knead dough with his own hands or carry round a basket of loaves like
St. Elizabeth on his head.’ Mrs. Hilliard ended hastily with a greater
concession to public opinion than her previous sentence had implied.
The next moment she began to laugh at the picture she had conjured
up. ‘I think I see him,’ she exclaimed, in high glee; ‘as if he did
not make a sufficient spectacle of himself already—an Adonis who must
contort himself into a Caliban—what a waste of good looks!’
‘I do not agree with you,’ said Catherine, with her sincerity as
striking and more rampant than Fan Constable’s. ‘In the first place, he
is not an Adonis, though he is a fairly handsome man. In the second, I
should hate good looks which were not liable to be affected by temper
and mood. They would be little better than those of a barber’s block.
As a contrast, I could easily understand the fascination of the mobile
ugliness of a Mirabeau. An Adonis liable to be replaced at any moment
by a Caliban, is not at all a bad idea for enhancing the fugitive
graces of Adonis. But Oliver Constable is not an Adonis.’
‘So be it, since you will have it so,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, shrugging
her shoulders. ‘But my theory of real good looks is that they should
rise superior to every vicissitude. Oliver Constable doth profess too
much. I do not say he is intentionally hypocritical, but I imagine
he has been nettled by his connection with trade, and now he is
going to brazen it out, and thrust it down people’s throats, forcing
his fellow-creatures to own that there is nothing like trade in the
end. Very likely, too, he is not averse to drawing more money from
money-making concerns. What more natural than that he should have
inherited the trading spirit, and be still keener in business than his
father was? Only he ought not to assume a cloak of philanthropy.’
Mrs. Hilliard deprecated enthusiasm as stoutly as if she had been a
great diplomatist, and distrusted every profession which had not in it
a large leaven of openly proclaimed self-interest and cynicism, while
in her cheerful pessimism she treated the reverse as a good joke.
‘The game is not worth the candle,’ said Catherine, letting her
heavily weighted eyelids drop.
‘It is far worse than that. Oliver Constable’s crotchet will not merely
come to grief like other crotchets, it will serve to unsettle the young
man. It will cost him the fair start in life he might have commanded,
and of which he might have made something, if he has a tithe of the
ability which has been liberally attributed to him. Though I laughed at
first, and though I cannot help smiling still, at what I foresee of the
manifestations of Fan’s wrath, still as an older woman and a relative
of the family, however remote, I am sorry. I have sufficient grace left
for that,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, with greater seriousness and with some
genuine good feeling.
Catherine continued to look as if she saw no cause either for joy or
sorrow, as if she were drearily impervious to emotion from the actual
world outside herself and her books. Catherine’s faith and hope in
humanity had reached the lowest ebb.
Oliver Constable’s aims would meet with nothing at the Meadows, save
ridicule on the one hand, and unbelief on the other.
CHAPTER VIII.
OLIVER’S PROCLAMATION IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE.
OLD Peter Constable had been a good master in more senses than one—a
better master, inasmuch as he and his servants understood each other,
than his son seemed likely to prove. Peter had kept his men long in
his service, but it so happened that at this date, from death and
other weeders-out of grey-headed workpeople, the men in the mill were
comparatively young. The head man, who had been promoted recently, was
not older than Oliver himself, and as yet supported such dignity as he
had to maintain in a sheepish fashion, while his trumpet still gave
forth an uncertain sound. Accordingly, the new master’s announcement,
though it excited a good deal of curiosity, drew forth no protest, not
even a private one, in this quarter.
Oliver’s little speech was made with a great effort in a pause of
the drowsy hum of the machinery and the equally lulling splash of
the water—churned into the likeness of foaming milk by the rapid
revolutions of the mill-wheel. In the middle of the self-consciousness
and confusion which beset him, and disturbed the clear sequence of his
best thoughts and ideas, Oliver made it be heard and understood that
he was to keep on the mill and take the chief management in the room
of his father. He succeeded in saying that he expected the men to do
him faithful service, while he would try his best to make their close
connection the mutual benefit it ought to be. He hoped that each man
of them, as well as himself, saw only one interest between master
and servant, and would be ready to back him in trying to do his duty.
Therefore, as he would not stint them in their wages, without a good
cause which he should put plainly before them, or ask them to make
bricks without straw—that is, to grind corn without sufficient water
power, mechanical power, reasonable time and competent guidance—so
he trusted they would be prepared to play their part in furnishing
the due amount of labour, and not demean themselves to any of the
tricks of palming off bad, slovenly, half-completed work, for good
and thorough work, which were bringing labour into general disrepute,
and threatening to become the curse and ruin of the integrity and
prosperity of England, where employers and employed were concerned.
Oliver told them frankly that for their sake—no less than for his own,
he would not consent to take scamped work, or any known lazy, knavish
substitute for honest work, from the best and most skilled workmen, in
other respects, among them.
In return, his workpeople had a right to require from him not only
punctual payment of their wages, but intelligent consideration of their
position, helpful sympathy with their efforts, forbearance for their
blunders, as he should claim tolerance from them for his mistakes.
Although he had thought it advisable to begin by warning them of
what he could not and ought not to permit in their relation, he also
told them what they were not called upon to bear from him—heartless
indifference to their welfare, and unprincipled gambling with flesh and
blood, as the means of keeping up the game of speculation rather than
fair trade. He was ready to trust them for the loyal discharge of their
obligations, till they were put to the proof. He asked them in return
to trust his father’s son till they learned to know him better as their
master.
If it was a strain upon Oliver Constable to make such a speech except
to his cronies, and he only made it by a kind of mental and physical
convulsion, it was also a strain upon the young men in the mill to
listen properly. They could not compose themselves to catch half the
words, far less their meaning. They grinned and gaped at each other,
and every man looked how his immediate neighbour was conducting
himself, rather than attended to Oliver. Yet they did not fail to
develop instantly keen criticism of what might be called Oliver’s style
of public speaking. ‘Goin’ to school and college hain’t made him speak
out, or thump with his fist in the right place, like old Sam Snuffles
the Methody, as roars hisself hoarse, and lashes all around him so
that a chap has to duck his head for safety. Old Sam beats the young
master, old Sam does, hout and hout,’ reflected one lad, in a vein
of class conceit and agreeable superciliousness. Another promising
youth, who had been reared at a seaport, made an apt comparison in his
mind between the speaker and a heavily-laden vessel, sailing against
the wind, labouring and tacking; ‘and if I was only near him, I would
lay you any odds but I’d hear his timbers groaning,’ the ingenious
youngster silently pursued the simile which he was reserving for future
use.
But Ted Green, the head man in the mill, never got beyond the news
that ‘the concern’ was not to stand still or be transferred to other
ownership, which might have endangered Ted’s late rise in the world.
He pondered throughout the whole of the remaining sentences, on the
substance of the introductory remark. He wished he could go home to his
wife and repeat to her the welcome assurance. Wishes were useless in
the present case, they could not even free Ted from the responsibility
of acting as the mouthpiece of the men under him in replying to the
address. Naturally, Ted only replied to what had gone into his ears and
taken hold of his mind. Still, as the intelligence grasped by him had
been of a pleasant sort, one might have expected that there would have
been warmth, at least, in the partial response. But Ted was stolid as
well as stupid—a large, heavy-looking, fair-complexioned young man,
with the fairness increased to positive pallor by such a plentiful
application of flour to the skin as would have put to shame the thick
powdering preceding the thicker painting of the fine ladies of the last
century. Ted leant against the door-post with that hopeless incapacity
to stand upright which is mostly shown by sailors on firm ground. ‘You
aire, sir,’ said Ted, abruptly and concisely, with idiotic vagueness
and apparently the utmost phlegm.
Oliver had to knit his brows and think for a moment before he
recognised that the two words replied concisely to the single
statement that he was to keep on the mill, while they were totally
irrelevant to what he considered the gist of the speech which he had
pumped up by a severe struggle out of the depth of the temporary chaos
of his mind. It sounded as if Ted and his fellows dismissed that with
cynical contempt and only troubled themselves to grapple with the bit
of information which was practical in their eyes.
‘Well, I take it, since there is no question of parting company, me
and my mates here don’t object to present terms—not at present,’ Ted
resumed and ended with stiff and wary, but unmistakable condescension,
the moment the decision had, in his judgment, passed over to the men.
‘Not at present, sir,’ the young millers confirmed their leader’s
opinion with one voice, as if it were worked by the mill machinery, and
rendered a little husky and obscure by the pervading dust.
Oliver’s gravity was nearly upset. At the same time, he was aware of
a slight sense of repulse, and consequent disappointment, which he
said to himself proved him to be the inveterately sanguine and hasty
beggar with whose foolish traits he ought at this date to have been
familiar enough to overcome them, and set their reactionary influence
at defiance.
But he could not help looking forward to receiving a little more
encouragement in the bakehouse, were it only in an indignant
apprehension of some of his inferences, and a dogged assertion of
a working baker’s rights, including that of testing the quality of
his work, and of dealing with his master, in the full bloom of class
prejudice, as his natural enemy. It was all very well to speak of
the superior comfort and general agreeability of a miller’s life
over that of a baker. The former had the advantage in the matter of
picturesqueness like the toil of the day labourer in the fields over
the artisan’s—above all the petty tradesman’s occupations. Yet there
could be no comparison—taking the two trades _en masse_—of which was
the more intelligent of the two.
There were honourable exceptions of ploughmen-poets and young
shepherds, among the lowly pastoral hills, who had lived to become—like
David, king of Israel—leaders of men. But the exceptions only proved
the rule.
In the same line of argument the sallow-faced journeymen bakers, with
their complexions bleached by so much of their lives spent in the
atmosphere of the oven, even the forward lads who, after the ancient
fashion of Pharaoh’s chief baker, poised on their heads baskets full
of ‘all manner of baked meats’ or more ponderous loaves, and traversed
the streets of Friarton, had their minds and their very faces sharpened
by contact, at once wider and closer, with their fellows. And the
bakers were as far in intellectual advance of the manly young louts of
millers whose employment consisted chiefly in heaving up and down sacks
of corn and flour, and mechanically feeding the mill, as the millers
were before ordinary farm servants.
Oliver counted, too, on Jim Hull, his father’s old factotum and
right-hand man, such a long-established ‘institution’ in the bakehouse
and shop, that Peter Constable had been wont to say, Jim was not only a
great deal better acquainted with the details of the business than he,
Peter, had been able to continue, so that he should not like to venture
on any step without Jim’s concurrence, but that, in fact, he would
hardly consent to such a liberty taken with him and his position. He
knew his own importance, and while he had the interest of the master as
much at heart as any Constable of them all could have it, Jim was just
a trifle inclined to take the rule into his own hands and reign on his
own account.
Oliver had compared Jim Hull to those mayors of the palace who had
founded the Carlovingian dynasty in the west of Europe; but while
Oliver himself felt by no means inclined to act the lackadaisically
sentimental part of the long-haired monarchs of France, he believed
he might reckon on his man for something shrewd and telling, whether
on his master’s side or against him. And Oliver secretly sighed for a
foeman worthy of his steel, for the stimulus of the sharpest opposition
to balance the enervating languor induced by his sister Fan’s
despairing acquiescence, and Ted Green and his companions’ mortifying
indifference where Oliver’s will was concerned.
The Constables’ extensive bakehouse and shop at Friarton bore no
resemblance in any respect to Friarton Mill. In place of being a
venerable structure—half superannuated, it was a comparatively new
building furnished with every modern improvement, in full activity.
Indeed it had been erected by Peter Constable’s enterprise when he
began to flourish greatly in his twin trades. The large and somewhat
staring shop had an intimation inscribed over the door, ‘Peter
Constable, Baker and Confectioner,’ and the pledge was fulfilled in the
display of every description of British bread within the windows. The
shop and its double sign stood out boldly and with perfect confidence
among the shops in the old-fashioned High Street where the weekly
corn market was still held, on the pavement before the door of the
Ayott Arms Inn. Old Peter Constable had attended the corn market
with the regularity of clock-work, and had enjoyed the opportunity
afforded him, in the intervals between inspecting samples of grain, of
looking over the way with entire complacency at the handsome shop and
bakehouse which were among the fruits of his industry and enterprise.
The immediate vicinity of the shop had also enabled Peter to entertain
hospitably select little parties of his customers among the farmers,
in the back-shop, and to conclude bargains with them there in greater
privacy than could be found in the street, or in the commercial room
of the inn. Fan Constable, in walking up Friarton High Street, had not
looked upon the great bake-shop with the same favourable eyes. But she
was a true and high-spirited woman. She had never gone out of her way
or got up an excuse to avoid passing her father’s shop-door. She had
walked straight by it, though she might not have been able to prevent
her foolish colour from rising, in company with Mrs. Fremantle, and
while Fan saw Clara Houghton advancing in the opposite direction. Fan
would have risked meeting Clara on the doorstep, and if the vicar’s
daughter had declined to own acquaintance with a valuable ally and an
old school-fellow to boot because of the fire of half-mischievous,
half-malicious eyes which Fan knew so well were watching the
encounter, then let the friendship come to a violent end on the spot,
the miller and baker’s daughter would have said without hesitation,
though its destruction must undoubtedly have proved a blow to Fan.
She had never failed her father or even betrayed any repugnance to
joining him at the shop when she was in town with him on market days,
and he was to drive her home in the pony phaeton, which to please Fan
had superseded a gig, just as the gig had in its time, to please Fan’s
mother, taken the place of a spring cart.
Fan had only not been equal to getting up an enthusiasm for the
contents of pans and trays, in well-raised loaves and crisp biscuits,
and she did not see that she was called upon—good housekeeper though
she was—to be one of the severely initiated in the inner mysteries
of bread made with or without yeast, steamed or not steamed. She was
guilty of greater wilful ignorance in the matter of bread than in any
other domestic question; though of course she was acquainted with such
an A B C piece of knowledge as how to distinguish a cottage from a pan
loaf when she saw them, while she was perfectly aware that the Polley
girls had a joke among them and their companions, of her affected
ignorance in this particular.
It had certainly vexed Fan when her father, in his satisfaction with
his bread, would illustrate its excellence by lightly patting the crust
or gently pinching the crumb. She confessed to herself she hated to
see him on an emergency, when he had sent the shopman out and no other
man or boy was in the way, quietly step behind the counter, and in the
innocence of his heart, sell a twopenny loaf to a working woman or a
halfpenny biscuit to a child. And Fan had the conviction that rather
than witness Oliver, with his college breeding, and the gentleman-like
character impressed on his very twists and grimaces, demean himself to
dispense the staff of life, as his father had done before him, to his
fellow-townspeople, she would herself go behind the counter and wait
on the mocking public. It is to be feared that Fan would have offered
cakes and buns with a tragedy air which would have repelled all save
the most persistent buyer.
Oliver had assured himself that he had long ago got over the boyish
weakness—barely excusable in a boy, and the paltriest of all follies
in a man—which, to do men justice, a large proportion of them cast
off with the growth of their beards, of wincing under the knowledge
that his father had been in trade—in the primitive trade—of a baker.
Oliver had fancied he had well-nigh forgotten the sneaking sense of
affront at the pit whence he had been dug. But it seemed the sillier
and more Jeames-like a social definition was, the more it stuck in
the consciousness of its victim. Oliver, to his disgust, experienced
a sensation of personal discomfort, an inclination to avoid public
attention, when he walked into the Friarton bake-shop in the light of
the heir come to take possession. He had to relieve his self-disgust
by defying his self-consciousness, standing up as large as life and
lounging purposely in the sight of the bystanders for a few minutes. He
had to sit down in the retirement of the back-shop and smoke a pipe to
recover his equanimity as he meditated on the manliness of Thackeray’s
Philip on his way through the world, bowing with perfect nonchalance
and satisfaction from the ‘knife-board’ of an omnibus, to his
fashionable friends in their carriages. Oliver ended by recalling the
occasion when as a small boy he was led by his father through the same
premises, then in the process of building. Little Oliver had enjoyed
the inspection at least as much as his father had enjoyed making it
with him, and had listened with pride while the owner of the place
told the child—when there was no thought of Oliver’s developing into
a scholar—a gentleman far above such low aims as baking and selling
bread—that the buildings would be his one day—he should get the chief
good out of them after they had paid their cost to the builder. ‘And
you’ll make something worth while out of them, Nolly? You’ll be up to
all the new improvements that ain’t mere catchpennies? You’ll bake and
sell the best and cheapest bread in the county—won’t you now, my little
chap?’
‘Yes, Far’er,’ little Oliver had answered, with unhesitating
cheerfulness, as children will undertake without doubt or fear to
conquer kingdoms.
After that recollection, Oliver had only to rise and perform a
pantomime of freeing his arms from an encumbrance, to get rid of what
shreds remained of that parti-coloured garment of the conventional
fool, which we have most of us considerable difficulty to escape from
wearing, each in his turn.
Oliver was fit to go to the bakehouse, and, in the sweat of his brow,
deliver his speech a second time—in this instance to his bakers. They
were a set of men both young and middle-aged, some portly, some lean,
all more or less yellow rather than white-skinned—like the millers, for
these were not the lads who spent a large part of their day in the open
air distributing the bread. These were journeymen who had not their
time at their own disposal, and even if they had, would not, unless
in perhaps one exceptional case, have devoted their leisure with the
enthusiasm of genius to the pursuit of any branch of natural history,
taking the student out into the fields and woods like the famous baker
whose book was the iron-bound coast and the bleak moors of Caithness.
The sallow complexions of the bakers were brought out in relief by
their white caps as they stood with their shirt sleeves rolled up to
their elbows. The men had left their baking boards for the day, but
still had to keep a vigilant eye on the ovens in the background. As
the party came forward to listen to the new owner of the business,
they fell naturally into the attitude of a deputation, with one
man representing their leader pushed well into the foreground, who
instinctively caught up his apron under his left arm as a sign in
character. But he was not Jim Hull.
Jim Hull was in a white suit like the rest. But his suit was
conspicuously shrunk at the wrists and ankles as if he had grown away
from the original fit in his growing days and yet had adhered to the
measurement in anticipation of the time when he should begin to grow
down, not up, to bend nearer the earth instead of raising his head high
above it. Jim stood a little apart from the group of bakers and their
future master, as Oliver addressed his views to his workmen. Contrary
to Oliver’s anticipations, Jim preserved at least the attitude of
neutrality in the encounter.
Jim Hull was an elderly man with a compact face, as if his rather neat
and regular features had been compressed so as to take up the least
room. He had a remarkably clear, keen eye under the grizzled hair which
hung low on his square forehead, for a man approaching threescore.
He had been a faithful servant in the Constables’ service from youth
to approaching age. He was not without a kind of feudal sentiment
both to the family and the business. It gave him a certain amount of
gratification that they should still remain united—that Master Oliver
had not cut the whole concern and turned his back on it as if it were a
disgrace. On the other hand, Jim had his own deeply rooted prejudices
and his own schemes, and he was capable, as his former master had
foreseen, of becoming factious and troublesome if he were thwarted in
his opinions, and mortified in his conceit.
Jim had not in the least anticipated the course Oliver Constable was
taking; so far from it, Jim had entertained a project of risking his
bachelor savings and enabling a favourite nephew who was already a
tolerably successful master baker in a neighbouring village, to buy the
Constables’ business, and carry it on in Friarton with the further help
of Jim’s experience.
But, to do the old man justice, he would have resigned this private
plan with less reluctance if he had been satisfied with Oliver
Constable’s rearing, or with the young man personally.
Jim listened and reflected, standing all alive and vigilant with his
hands clasped behind him. ‘Peter Constable kneaded his batch by my
side, many’s the day, when we were lads. He could set the sponge better
than I could, when we were fellow-apprentices to his father. Peter’s
mind was in the baking business from the first. Now young Oliver has
been bred different, and his mind has been in his books—that’s what
makes me mistrustful of his proposal, and not altogether agreeable to
it, though it comes from his father’s son and does him no discredit—I’m
bound to say,’ thought Jim. ‘’Arry Reddock can look out for himself,
and I’m not pledged to take him up, if I were sure of this turn of
affairs. But young Oliver’s an amature—that’s what he is—and no good
comes of amatures. He’ll make ducks and drakes of as fine and solid a
business as ever three generations got together; and he’s a crotchety
lad, too. Hear to him, what he’s telling the lads! about everything
being above-board—as if there ever was a trade without its secrets—and
of his not passing over a man’s shirking his work and disobeying
orders, as if any tradesman—be he ever so flourishing—can afford in
them times to quarrel with his best hand, maybe, because he has a mind
of his own, or will go on the spree nows and thens, or is not careful
to make his batches every bit as light and sweet as they may be. Master
Oliver has to find this is a world in which a man must live and let
live and act conformable to circumstances.
‘He ought to be rare and perfect as a master that demands a perfect
servant, and them is not the days for that uncommon commodity when the
servants are like to have the ruling of the masters—instead of the
masters the picking and choosing of the servants. This young fellow has
to learn life out of college, and he had as well learn his trade at the
same time before he takes upon him to be a master baker.’
But Jim Hull kept his counsel in the meanwhile. It was the foremost man
of the group of bakers who spoke out in reply to Oliver. ‘Do you mean
to say, sir,’ said the man, not disrespectfully, but with a flavour of
offence in his tone, ‘that there are to be a set of fresh arrangements
made here, and that we are to consent beforehand—without knowing what
we are doing—to a whole lot of new-fangled ways?’ And there was a
murmur of assent to the objection from the men behind him.
‘I don’t see the obligation, Webster,’ said Oliver, who simply knew the
man by name.
Webster was a young man of not more than five-and-twenty, though he was
put prominently forward by his fellows. He had bushy sandy-coloured
hair, and a large up-turned nose with deep lion-like lines drawn from
its base to the corners of his mouth.
Oliver spoke calmly, but he felt in some degree taken aback and ruffled
by the commentary on his words. ‘The business has been conducted on
the same principles all along. But if I see it advisable to make
alterations, I shall let you know, when you must be prepared to agree
to them, or quit my employment.’
‘All right, sir,’ said Webster, promptly. ‘Of course you are entitled
to say that much, while you will not refuse to allow that there are two
at a bargain-making.’
So the brief colloquy, which was only ‘feeling the way’ on the part of
both master and man, came to an abrupt conclusion.
Oliver returned to the back-shop, taking Jim Hull with him.
‘Sit down, Jim, and make yourself comfortable,’ said Oliver, bringing
out a bottle of ale and glasses from the familiar cupboard and taking
the second armchair. ‘Now, what about that lad Webster who spoke up for
the others?’
‘He’s a good baker when he likes, which is more than can be said of
most of your speechifiers and politicians,’ said Jim.
‘Then he’ll like to bake well for me, or he’ll turn out of the
bakehouse,’ said Oliver, holding up his glass to the light.
‘Stop a bit, not so fast,’ said Jim, putting down his glass for a
moment, after a testing sip. ‘Your father always kept good ale in
cask and in bottle because he gave it time to clear and ripen, so he
did. You had better think—if I’m at liberty to speak,’—he paused, and
Oliver nodded. ‘You see, I was afraid new men might mean new manners,’
went on Jim, clearing his throat. ‘What I was going to say comes
to this, where are you to get a better man to put in Sam Webster’s
place? You must consider that, sir, before you speak of dismissing Sam
hot and sharp. Good bakers, in a country town in especial, ain’t as
plentiful as blackberries, now-a-days, Master Oliver; and if Sam go and
stump the neighbourhood—that, and reading, and holding forth on them
newspapers is second nature to the fellow—if he tell everywhere what an
oonreasonable master young Constable is like to be, why you may have to
whistle long enough for a new baker fit to stand in the shoes of Sam,
though he do be off and on troublesome.’
‘You and Sam had better wait and find if I am an unreasonable master,’
said Oliver, with a smile. ‘Who is letting his imagination go ahead, I
should like to know? I made no unreasonable stipulation. I did not bid
the men do by me what I am not willing to do by them. If I am to be
a master baker I shall not feed my customers on husks and worse, Sam
Webster and his allies may rest assured of that—and in order that I may
be honest in all my dealings, I will have proper work out of my men.’
Jim looked dubious. ‘Excuse me, sir, but do you know what proper work
of this sort is, and what are the conditions of work in general at this
date? You don’t mean to be oonreasonable, but a man’s intentions and
his deeds don’t always square.’
‘Granted. But do you mean there are trades-unions and strikes among
the Friarton bakers, and that we may be reduced any day—not as a matter
of eccentric taste, or in obedience to a doctor’s prescription, but
as a case of necessity—to eat unleavened bread like the Jews in the
Passover week, or to bake at home, a lost art where housewives and
maid-servants are concerned?’
‘It ain’t a laughing matter,’ Jim rebuked the young man’s levity; ‘and
if the things themselves ain’t here—and I have not heard tell yet of
trades-unions and strikes among the bakers in Friarton—do you think
their spirit ain’t about in the air? Do you think the bakers alone
of working men,’ continued Jim, with an accent of injured _esprit de
corps_, ‘will be content to remain without a voice, ay, and a precious
influential voice, in all that concerns them nearly—their hours of
work, their mode of work, and mode of pay, and all the rest of it? Are
the bakers to be left behind when every other specie of working man
is having his say? I should not have consented to that myself, when I
was a young baker; now, I am nigh an old man,’ Jim cooled down at the
recollection, ‘and I’m free to admit that I don’t see much good comes
of speechifying and vapouring,’ ended Jim, drinking off his ale and
drawing a long sigh after the refreshment.
‘Well hit at me, old “specie,”’ thought Oliver, while he said, quietly,
‘Nobody is preventing any man from having his say in what particularly
concerns him. It is one of the privileges that living in the present
generation has given him. I should be the last person to object to it.
I intended the men to take what I said to them into consideration; only
I can’t, for the life of me, see what just and rational argument they
have to bring against it; I touched on no debatable point. If they are
worth their salt in morals as in ability, they are surely willing to
give a fair exchange of work for wages. And if the men have a grain
of common sense, they must grant that no organised system of work can
be maintained without one person in authority to enforce discipline on
those under him.’
‘The capital and labour question ain’t so easily settled as you
suppose, Master Oliver,’ said Jim, shaking his head doggedly if
somewhat evasively. ‘At the best it is a very ticklish matter, and I
only hope you won’t burn your fingers meddling with it.’
‘I can guess you are of opinion that I am not setting about the task
in the proper fashion; but wait till you see how I get on, Jim,’ said
Oliver, good-humouredly; ‘don’t damp my spirits by forecasting evil.’
‘I wouldn’t wish to do that,’ said Jim, more formally than heartily or
cheerfully. ‘That don’t belong to my place. But I’m nigh an old man,
about as old as your father, and grown grey with the Constables: if
putting my experience at your service could have been of any use, it
belonged to my dooty.’
‘Thanks,’ said Oliver, quickly. ‘You are quite right to ease your
conscience. But I am afraid I must earn my experience like the rest of
the world—I must have my fling—try to work out my theories, and when
they break down, then begin to mend them—do you take me, Jim?’
‘Oh, ay, sir,’ said Jim with polite dryness, ‘and I had as well say
good morning to you, and go about my own business in the bake-shop.’
Oliver let him go, and sat alone twisting his stalwart body in his
armchair. ‘The game would not be worth the candle,’ he reflected, ‘if
one paid heed only to these clods in the mill and cheeky swaggerers
in the bakehouse; and there is old Jim, conservative to the backbone,
even while he is full to the tongue of class prejudice and jealousy.
He feels the world turning upside down with him; yet he sets his face
against the only hope of control for the new spirit. But the principles
of right and wrong are eternal and as capable of being fought out in a
mill and a bakehouse as on any other battle-field.’
CHAPTER IX.
THE NEW TENANTS OF COPLEY FARM.
OLIVER was standing before the mulberry-bush in the mill-house court
watching the colony of white ducks which waddled up from the water and
claimed their right in the dropping mulberries.
He had stepped out of one of the windows of the parlour, which Fan,
with tacit reproach and soreness of spirit, had re-constituted the
family sitting-room. Since Oliver chose to be a miller and baker,
the old mill-house parlour was in keeping with his calling and good
enough for him. Oliver welcomed the change with much satisfaction
which escaped being damped from his want of full knowledge of what
was passing in his sister’s mind, and his absolute incapacity of
sympathising with it.
He stood hunching up his shoulders, his hands in his pockets. He was
bareheaded, so that the light summer wind lifted his hair, blowing it
across his forehead as near his eyes as the shortness of the locks
would allow, without discomposing him. The same wind every moment
plucked off and strewed about the last full-blown red and white rose
petals and reversed the leaves of the mulberry and the willow round
the corner, turning their white sides uppermost and silvering whole
branches at once.
Oliver was wondering why he should feel any particular pleasure in
contemplating the ducks wriggling their short necks with delight,
rolling about like ships at sea, quivering their tail-tufts of
feathers, making rushes to snatch the beaded maroon morsel, each
duck from his neighbour, at last gobbling down the mulberry with an
intensity of relish which in its breadth of display was farcical in the
extreme. But Oliver did find so much satisfaction in the spectacle that
he was tempted to propose to take Sally Pope’s office out of her hands,
and feed the ducks from their basket of mill refuse every morning.
They would soon learn to know his step and voice as they knew Sally’s.
Pooh! it was all egotism, to be gratified by a duck’s recognition. It
was a thread of vanity which in Rousseau reached the diseased pitch of
imagining that the sparrows were chattering jibes at him. But how much
more lovable, after all, if less respectable, was a vain man or woman
than your Lucifer or Luciferina who made a boast of his or her proud
indifference!
Oliver was aware that he had a sneaking fondness for approbation. He
would have liked Ted Green and every hulking hobble-de-hoy about the
mill, as well as Fan and Sally Pope with her subordinates, to have a
real regard for him and trust in him. He would have liked old Jim Hull
and the men in the bakehouse to believe that he meant them well, and
would serve them no less than himself, if he could. It was a weakness
of course, and all that he was likely to get for his pains, was that
everybody would incline to suspect him of being a humbug where he was
not a fool, and no one would understand that he was setting himself,
according to his light, to be a good citizen, though the effort in his
case went in some respects against the grain.
Catherine Hilliard had plenty of sympathy and admiration to spare for
every good citizen and patriot, a history of whose achievements got
between the boards of a book; nay, she wasted interest and regard on
some patriots of rather doubtful complexion—Count Egmont and Camille
Desmoulins, for example. She only saw them in their dress-coats and
revived togas, as the men figured in print; she could not guess that
in their dressing-gowns and slippers, or what stood for their undress,
the fellows were self-indulgent and ‘rough customers’ enough, like
ordinary men. But a simple tradesman was nobody in Catherine’s eyes,
because his ambition reached no higher than to give back to his branch
of trade that integrity and excellence which ought to be the crowning
distinction of all honest trade in an honest—not to say a Christian
nation—because he would magnify his peculiar field of work and make it
honourable, feeding the people with material food convenient for their
bodily life, as Frederick Perthes, the prince of booksellers, strove
in his day to raise the book trade of Germany and sought to feed the
minds and hearts of his countrymen with spiritual food. It was a trifle
to her that the faintest approach should be made to elevating whole
classes, with regard to which the present absurd and dishonouring creed
was that no member could rise without abandoning his homely trade and
his fellow-traders. In the name of Heaven, if the craft were honest,
could it not be ennobled in its loyal performance? Had it not been so
with many a craft, such as those of the goldsmith, the weaver, and the
dyer, now treated with comparative contempt, in old burgher towns and
free cities, when the craftsmen were men of genius, skill, and taste
far advanced in civilisation?
People might tell him—Oliver, that such an ornamental craft as that
of a goldsmith, for instance, requiring notable skill and taste, was
one thing, and a purely useful business like that of a baker, was
another. But he was prepared to show that the fine arts were very far
from being what their idle amateur worshippers, not their true and
humble disciples, represented them to be, in the economy of a people.
He did not cry down art or learning, perhaps it would have been easier
for him, on the whole, if he had appreciated each of them less. Yet
bread—not art—was the staff of life, and One who had come among them
as the King of men had not thought it beneath his Divinity to work
miracles in order to give common bread to hungry multitudes.
There was a notion current among competent authorities, that the
physique and stamina of English men and women, especially in the large
towns, were undergoing a gradual disastrous deterioration. If this
were true and arrived at its natural culmination, the world might
not fare the better for the lapse of that portion of the Anglo-Saxon
race which had elected itself, in its more vigorous days, the pioneer
of civilisation and the champion of liberty all over the world.
Unadulterated food—which also inferred less craving for intoxicating
drink—better lodging, legislation which should enact and compel freer
space, purer air, fresher water, and the light of day, ought to do
something to arrest the progress downwards. But the great hope, under
God and his Son, lay in the recovery of true manliness and womanliness;
to work—not dream—for the love of the work, and not for the wages
alone; to be in the world as one who served with a will; to recognise
fully that life did not consist of its lower gains, equally Philistine
whether they belonged to a respectable bank-book or a disreputable
betting-book. For when one came to the rank materialism of the
things, it did not so much signify whether the object of desire and
attainment implied being made secretary of state or mayor of Friarton,
churchwarden of St. Philip’s or deacon of the chapel, or whether it
descended to the lower level of the possibility of drinking champagne
on occasions, as a variety on unlimited gin-and-water.
Oliver was brought up short in his cogitations. He heard footsteps and
voices approaching, and conjectured they belonged to two men whose
figures in grey suits and wide-awakes he had seen ten minutes before,
from the other side of the Mill, making their way through Copley Grange
Park. He had remarked the new-comers particularly, since he had not
heard that the Squire had come home, and visitors from that quarter
proved comparatively rare when the family were not at Copley Grange.
The Mill had to put up with the plague of its picturesqueness, and
Oliver found himself called upon to display the good citizenship he
so insisted upon, in giving up a portion of his privacy to render the
picturesqueness public property. He did not come out of the ordeal
without flaw. Certainly, he refrained from inaugurating his reign as
many another good citizen has inaugurated his, by erecting barriers
where his father had raised none. Oliver objected to calling his
mill his castle, and defying anybody who was not on mill business,
and with whom Oliver was not on speaking terms, from approaching its
time-mellowed walls. Therefore he scouted Ted Green’s suggestion to
keep a watch-dog, even on chain, and for the protection of the outlying
sacks of wheat and flour.
But Oliver Constable did not show himself remarkably cordial to
absolute strangers, especially when they came from Copley Grange. On
the contrary, he avoided them almost as resolutely as Fan did. He would
make a point that the place should be free to the Dadds and Polleys of
Friarton, or, for that matter, to any inhabitant of the town; for he
earnestly wished that his fellow-townsmen of all classes—the lower the
better—should profit by the rural beauty of Friarton Mill. But perhaps
Catherine Hilliard was right when she said that he looked upon those
persons who were not happy enough to belong to the trading class as
outside his purpose. Indeed, Oliver Constable’s relations with the
upper ten at Oxford, and all he had insensibly acquired from them, only
rendered him more determined to have nothing to do with them. He waged
no war with his superiors in social rank, but their respective paths
lay wide apart. There were plenty of tuft-hunters and eager satellites
struggling in the wake of the objects of their homage without Oliver’s
adding himself to the number. Indeed, there was danger in the
association; for the mere conception of another social atmosphere had
spoilt Fan for her world, and her world for Fan. It should not spoil
him—at least, so far as his work was concerned. It is very difficult
for an ardent reformer to steer clear of partisanship.
On the present occasion Oliver put up his back, and turned it in its
rounded form on his company. At the same time he accomplished a feat in
balancing himself, while winding one long leg round the other, much as
if he were borrowing a pattern from a duck now standing at ease on a
single leg before him.
‘That’s our man,’ said a genial voice behind him. ‘I thought I knew the
back, and the attitude nails him beyond mistake. Constable, what are
you doing here?’
Oliver could not lend a deaf ear to the enquiry; besides, he wondered
who was making it. He wheeled round, and saw that the two figures in
grey he had spied from a distance, had developed into two men—with whom
he had been on terms of slight acquaintance, though they had not lived
in his set, at Oxford. But what was a bare acquaintance on the banks
of the Isis threatened to assert itself as a positive friendship up in
Holmshire, on the threshold of Oliver’s mill.
When Oliver considered Harry Stanhope’s rashness and thoughtlessness,
Oliver felt he had not a moment to lose. He had never concealed his
antecedents like poor Tom Neaves, but he must now state roundly what
they had led to, before Harry swore eternal comradeship on the spot,
and poor Horace backed his brother in this as in all else.
‘What am I doing here?’ echoed Oliver, with a laugh. ‘Everything. I am
in my proper place. This is Friarton Mill, and I am the miller.’
‘Well, this is a go!’ said Harry, without the least attempt at the
concealment of his surprise. ‘Isn’t it awfully jolly, Horry?’ The
brother appealed to nodded in confirmation of the extreme jolliness of
the situation, which Oliver was slow to perceive.
‘I never knew these Stanhopes had such a feeling for natural scenery,’
said Oliver to himself, puzzled at his acquaintances’ manner of taking
his communication. ‘I thought—give Harry a rowing path or a hunting
field, and he would ask no more, while the other had not a mind of his
own. But I suppose they admire this,’ and Oliver glanced around him
complacently.
But Harry was ready to supply a different explanation of his
enthusiasm. ‘I knew you hailed from a farm or a mill, old fellow,’ he
said, lightly; ‘but I always thought the “’Varsity” old wives were
starching and stiffening you, preparatory to turning you out a parson
or a schoolmaster. I am glad you knew a thing worth two of that. And
Horry and I are in great luck to unearth you here.’
Oliver still remained in a fog as to what the luck could consist of,
unless Harry had private views on the fishing in the Brook, and counted
on Oliver’s making it sure to him. There was one piece of hospitality
which, as Oliver was not really a churl, he did not see he could avoid
dispensing. He must invite these fellows into the house to join Fan’s
tea-table. He hoped Fan would forgive it, because they were old college
men—not merely sightseers.
‘You don’t ask what brings us here,’ said Harry—clearly eager to tell
his secret. ‘Why, we are nearly as much at home—at least we shall be
soon—as you are. We are the new tenants of Copley Grange Farm. Horry
and I are going in for being English yeomen instead of Ceylon coffee
planters, as our governors intended we should be. The doctors found
Horry’s liver would not stand the tropics, and as the old man and I
have always stuck together, the entire project fell to the ground. We
made up our minds to rough it at home instead of in the colonies—to
descend a few steps in the ladder here, instead of crossing the seas
to do it there. Horry and I ain’t either swells or snobs, and we
haven’t got handles to our names to make the descent more difficult. We
thought we should like nothing better than to become yeomen—since we
were not born squires and could not very well be gamekeepers or grooms
without ceasing to continue our own masters. There are no English
regiments—the more’s the pity—such as the French used to have, into
which gentlemen cadets could enlist without losing caste altogether,
and being reduced to associate with the scum of the streets and the
fields in the guard-room. Any people that we have left, to speak of,
are all settled in the northern counties, well out of the reach of
the trial of coming across Horry and me driving in a market cart,
and selling our own pigs. For that matter, princes of the blood and
dukes are pleased to play at being farmers, and I do not see why poor
gentlemen may not slide down gracefully into the real thing. We are of
age and can do what we like, but we have also persuaded the uncles and
aunts into giving their consent to our taking this farm and investing
our princely capital in it. We have got a good bailiff to put us up to
the wrinkles, and we mean to go the whole hog.’
‘You haven’t asked my advice,’ said Oliver, ‘but I am afraid it won’t
answer—this won’t answer, Stanhope.’
‘Now, look here, Constable,’ argued the sanguine advocate, ‘you think
we are going in for being gentlemen farmers, and so will fall between
stools, but it is nothing of the kind. Didn’t I say we were going
the whole hog? Whatever that appropriate phrase may mean, we are to
learn to do everything for ourselves, just as we should have done in
Queensland or Natal. It is not the season for holding a plough, else I
should have tried it to-morrow. But we are in time for the first crop
of hay, and we are to help at the harvest. Won’t it be jolly fun, like
a page out of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” which somebody gave me to read
when I had scarlet fever at school a century ago—only I am afraid the
Miss Primroses are still more out-of-date, and will not show among the
haycocks next week. We thought of doing without a woman-servant, and
making our own beds and cooking our own grub. But since old Horry is
not as strong as a horse like me, we judged it better to change our
coats by degrees.’
‘You were right there,’ said Oliver, asking himself whether Harry
Stanhope were a greater young fool than he, Oliver, had ever taken
the trouble to rate the lad—the most thorough-going donkey Oliver had
encountered—whether Harry were in earnest or simply talking bosh,
knowing it to be bosh all the time? And if there should turn out to
be some foundation for what Stanhope was telling him, as, after all,
Oliver had no reason to question, here was a fine complication of the
difficulties of his position in these fellows establishing themselves
on the next farm to him, with the deliberate intention, however
wildly carried out, of exiling themselves from their own class and
naturalising themselves in Oliver’s! He did not for a moment entertain
the idea that the Stanhopes would aid him in his aims. The young men
would simply import their own faults and follies into a sphere in
which the brothers had neither part nor lot, while they would assuredly
ruin themselves in a pecuniary sense.
‘I say, Constable, you are a nice liberal-minded, benevolent fellow,
not to speak an encouraging word to two poor beggars seeking to better
themselves,’ interposed Harry Stanhope—partly in chaff, partly with
a deeper meaning in his words. ‘You are trying on the supercilious
dodge. But what would you have us turn our white hands to?’ holding up
a pair of paws very brown and a good deal hacked about the knuckles.
‘We haven’t got any brains to speak of, between the two. Our education
has been neglected, what with private tutors and Oxford. Poor Horry
was bowled out without any fault of his as soon as the wicket was set
up,’ he lowered his voice and said the last sentence in a cautious
undertone. ‘We are a likely pair to shine in the learned professions,
ain’t we?’ he resumed, with fresh spirit and light bravado. ‘All the
people who have the misfortune to be connected with us have been in
despair about what was to become of us ever since we were small shavers
in petticoats. Indeed, I fancy it was rather a mistake our being here
at all. They might have disposed of me in a marching regiment, where I
might have had a fair chance of being comfortably knocked on the head
and decently put out of sight, in a fashion becoming my station. But
the Maori or Zulu, or whatever gallant native gentleman was to do the
deed, must have looked sharp about it, else I was tolerably certain to
go to the dogs or the Jews and create a scandal in the mean time. I put
it to you how could I have helped it, Constable? I could not flatter
myself, and what was more no groaning old fogey of a relation could
cherish the forlorn hope that I was endowed with the genius of keeping
out of debt and rising in the army, while all the time I should
belong to a set who might be tailors’ sons and duffers of various
kinds, yet would, for the most part, have ten and twenty guineas to
spend in proportion to my one. Then we were two,’—here he dropped his
voice again, and spoke more quickly to hide some under-current of
feeling. ‘By Jove, I was not going to leave _him_ in the lurch, to
be recommended to board and vegetate in the country with one of your
needy parsons, as if Horry were a lunatic, or to be treated as a poor
relation, and a hanger-on at other men’s tables.’
The speaker, whom Oliver had known incorrigibly light of heart and
light of head in a world where even youthful beards are beginning
to wag with ominous seriousness, finished with some genuine though
repressed indignation.
The listener could not refuse to Harry Stanhope the credit of fidelity
to the solitary obligation he had owned—that of honest brotherly
regard, and of a certain amount of reason in his statement.
However, before Oliver could make any amends, Harry Stanhope set upon
him again with his mixture of confident assertion and gay banter. ‘I
should call it a shabby trick to treat us as intruders in your ranks,
even if you yourself were not the greatest humbug going. A reading man
and a prize man, to pretend to grind at any other stuff than Latin
or Greek or German philosophy! I bet you I could do it a great deal
better myself without so much as being coached beforehand. There was a
song I used to sing about the miller who “was drowned in his own mill
dam,” and I remember a couple of farces I have seen played on country
town boards and at circuses. There was a miller of Brentford who rode
like Dick Turpin, and there was a Scotch beggar who pounded a king at
Cramond Brig. I could take the parts in private theatricals any day. I
am not sure, indeed, whether I am not better cut out for the _rôle_ of
a jolly miller than for that of a heavy farmer.’
‘You do not know what you are speaking about,’ said Oliver, hotly, ‘if
you identify _bonâ-fide_ millers with stage ruffians.’ Then he was
struck with the absurdity of quarrelling with Harry Stanhope on such
a count. ‘Come along with me,’ he said, abruptly; ‘I’ll show you a
mill-house and my sister will give us some tea, if you don’t prefer a
glass of ale.’
‘Thanks,’ said Harry with cheerful alacrity, ‘either will be uncommonly
acceptable. We are as hungry as hawks and as thirsty as washer-women.
She won’t mind our muddy boots—will she? We have been trying to make
out the boundaries of our fields, and it saved trouble and felt
professional to walk in the ditches, instead of the growing corn.’
Oliver was dubious that Fan would mind more than the muddy boots in
the unceremonious addition to her tea-table, but he was in for it, and
it could not be helped.
Harry and Horace Stanhope were the grandsons of an impecunious English
peer. The boys, together with an only sister, had been left orphans at
an early age with small patrimonies to fall back upon. The children’s
kindred and guardians had been, as Harry represented them, a good
deal at a loss what to do with the lads in those hard times, where
slenderly-provided-for sprigs of the aristocracy are concerned. It
was far easier to deal with the girl, the interest of whose portion
would pay the expenses of her education and furnish her with dress
and pocket-money at a modest rate afterwards, while a childless aunt
undertook to give her a home and bring her out in society until she
attained her natural goal, a suitable establishment. But not only were
the two lads destitute of any special ability which should make up
for their lack of fortune among their compeers, one of the brothers,
Horace, the elder of the two, though he was always put second to Harry,
had started in life heavily weighted in any race for worldly success.
From the effects of an illness in childhood in which the infection was
caught from his younger brother, Horace had contracted a degree of
deafness, not enough to reduce him to an ear-trumpet, but sufficient to
put him at a serious disadvantage in the ordinary routine of school and
college, and in social intercourse.
The two brothers had always been inseparable; but though they formed a
marked instance of fraternal alliance, they were as unlike in person
and character as devoted friends sometimes are. The very nicknames
bestowed on them at school and college, which burlesqued their close
association, referred as often to the contrast as to the union between
them. They were dubbed not only ‘Romulus and Remus,’ and ‘Hengist and
Horsa,’ but ‘Valentine and Orson,’ and ‘Day and Night,’ or any other
couple of terms linked yet opposed to each other, which schoolboy and
undergraduate wits could compass. Harry was a fair-haired, sun-burned,
comely young athlete, great in muscular development, the popular
champion of boat-races and cricket-fields, though he had not reached
the eminence of figuring in his university’s ‘eight’ or ‘eleven,’ and
so had been denied the crowning glory of forming one of the heroes
in any spring or summer at Putney or Lord’s. He was so frank and
cordial, so honestly heedless of his own interests, no less than those
of his neighbours, that it was hard, even for men as unlike him as
Oliver Constable was, to resist altogether the influence of Harry’s
involuntary good fellowship when they happened to come in contact with
it.
Horace was sickly, sallow and stunted, with a good deal of the captious
testiness and jealous moroseness which are said to distinguish
unfavourably the mass of the victims of deafness from the bulk of their
fellow-sufferers from blindness. Horace Stanhope was as hard as Harry
was easy to get on with, and if left to himself would have held aloof
from his fellow-creatures as sedulously as Harry cast himself with a
disarming confidence on their sympathy. The single exception Horace
made was in favour of his brother, between whom and himself there had
existed a strong attachment—cemented by the curious attraction of
extremes—since the two young men were babies.
Harry saved his brother from utter isolation. The silent saturnine
lad, shut out by one of the chief doors of the senses from joining
in much of human effort and enjoyment, whether ‘at kirk or market’
or by friends’ hearths, transferred his active share in the struggle
of life and in its joys and sorrows to his brother, and vested and
centred in Harry the main part of Horace’s ambition, pleasure, and
pain, apart from what was purely physical. He elected to live as it
were vicariously, to take his experience by proxy. In accordance
with this choice, wherever Harry went, Horace followed at his
heels. Harry’s friends—and he was pre-eminently a young man of many
comrades—making them for good or for evil wherever he went, Horace
immediately adopted—although they might be as unlike him as he was
unlike Harry—in Horace’s silent, rather cantankerous fashion, which
caused his friendship to prove somewhat of an infliction to Harry’s
congenial associates. Whenever Horace shook off the heavy fetters of
his infirmity, and, instead of being doggedly indifferent, showed
himself alert and interested, one might be sure it was in something
that concerned Harry.
The dedication of Horace’s blighted life was made mutely even with
regard to himself, for his was a nature as shy and reticent as it was
tenacious. And it was an undreamt of mystery to Harry’s transparent,
unreflective disposition. Harry had only an instinctive sense that poor
old Horry would be lost without him—Harry. Why, his was the only voice
which, while still pitched in a natural key, Horry could distinguish
without difficulty—and did not that point plainly to the conclusion,
insisted the sapient Harry, that the two were meant to hang out
together? No, no, a wife, though she were ten times a beauty and an
heiress, could not induce him to cut the connection. And the advantage
was not all on one side, Harry went on to argue—for he was generous in
his youthful flush of manliness—he himself was like one of those little
fellows who are put out in repeating their lessons, if the youngsters
have not a pet button to finger. Now, Horry was his button. Harry
was convinced he could not get a single inning at cricket, or play
billiards save like a muff—horrible misadventure!—if he did not have
Horry to look out, or mark for him.
This was the pair whom Oliver Constable brought to Fan’s tea-table that
summer afternoon.
Fan received the strangers with very formal courtesy, until Oliver
mentioned them more particularly as fellow-Oxonians, when she suddenly
brightened all over and became gracious to the tips of her fingers, and
there was something specially flattering in Fan Constable’s earnest
abandonment of graciousness.
Oliver groaned a little privately—going off as he did on a wrong cue.
All women were led captive by good looks and winning tongues, and Harry
Stanhope was a bonnie, pleasant boy enough to serve for the pair, to
extend his passport to yellow-skinned, turned-tempered Horace. But
Oliver would have thought that Fan had more sense than to be carried
away by the eyes—granted that in measuring Harry from head to foot,
they found a sop for their individual weakness in the fact that his
whole air and every movement, no less than his clothes—rough and
ill-used, from his battered wide-awake to his muddy boots—belonged
originally to no farmer’s ‘cut,’ but were the bearing and dress of a
better-born, better-bred man.
But all the same, Oliver comforted himself with reckoning Fan would
be thoroughly disgusted when she learnt the young man’s precious
scheme. For if Oliver had wounded her sense of propriety by sticking to
their father’s trade from worthy motives, must she not be scandalised
outright by the Stanhopes’ mean-spirited desertion of their post and
voluntary abasement simply to save themselves from the trouble of
shaping a career and securing a provision for their wants in any other
fashion?
Oliver had not yet gauged the depths of a woman’s inconsistency. He
found himself twice deceived in his clever man’s egregious simplicity.
When Fan was told the news that the Stanhopes had become the tenants of
Copley Grange Farm, she grew radiant, and threw herself into Harry’s
mad project with positive enthusiasm.
Oliver looked on and listened with open-eyed wonder. He had not
objected altogether to his sister’s being won over to cordiality
towards the Stanhopes as his former associates. He had noticed with
ready approval how she had set herself to entertain Horace—as most in
need of entertainment, taking pains to raise and modulate her clear
voice to suit his deafness, and striving to find subjects which he
might care to discuss. It was the innate gentlewoman showing itself in
Fan as in all true women of whatever rank, which caused her, in the
office of hostess, to select the guest who was least attractive and
most apt to be neglected, and to lavish on him her chief cares. Oliver
had admired the delicate consideration which lay at the foundation of
a lady’s duty in this respect. He had also appreciated the tact which
had helped Fan to discover soon that her little attentions only bored
Horace, since he preferred to be let alone. The perception caused Fan
to turn and join in Oliver’s conversation with Harry. Then her brother
was amazed and certainly not edified to find that Fan, in spite of her
declared opinions, was warmly applauding and even, as it seemed to
Oliver, proposing to back Harry Stanhope in his enterprise. ‘Oliver
will be so glad to have you and your brother for neighbours;’ she put
the sentiment quite gratuitously into Oliver’s mouth in his presence;
‘and if he or I—sometimes a woman’s ideas are of some value where
housekeeping is concerned—can be of the least service to you, we shall
be very much pleased.’
Oliver could not believe his ears. It was not that there was the
least suspicion of forwardness or indecorum in Fan’s spontaneous
friendliness. The girl was perfectly incapable of such breaches of
good taste. But it was evident to anyone who knew her, that Fan was
interested and excited—to the extent of being carried out of herself,
in sheer sympathy with an adventure, which any reasonable man or woman
might have held as certain to provoke her contempt.
Sally Pope, coming in herself to remove the tea-tray, in the
accidental absence of another servant, could not refrain from casting
a questioning glance at Oliver. That appeal of Sally’s eyes said, ‘Do
you see Miss Fan? She is coming out of her shell for once in her life.
What makes her, that is so ill to please, so rarely taken with what the
talkative young gentleman is saying?’
Indeed, Fan’s ordinary quiet, reserved manner in society was
transformed as Oliver had never seen it before to a stranger, though
he had always been aware that it masked an ardent temperament. She
was exclaiming brightly, in answer to Harry’s far from discriminating
praise of the mill-house parlour. In fact the lad’s satisfaction,
though he was guiltless of any intention to produce such an impression,
gave Oliver Constable the impression that the family sitting-room
reminded Harry, in a confused not disagreeable way, of the parlour of
one of those rural alehouses which his pursuits had led him to frequent
a good deal.
‘I am so happy to hear you like this room,’ said Fan, ‘because the
parlour at Copley Grange Farm’ (which any impartial person would have
pronounced greatly inferior in Oliver’s judgment, and which Fan had
been in the habit of holding in very low estimation) ‘is just such
another homely, old-fashioned place. I must believe they have their
merits, since they strike you favourably. You have always been fond
of a country life, you tell me; then I think you will like being a
farmer. Hay-making, of course, is charming, and bean-hoeing is not
bad—to watch, at least. And you will take a deep interest in your
cattle and poultry, won’t you?’
‘What has come over Fan,’ was Oliver’s dumb protest. ‘_She_ never made
hay in her life. I did not suppose she condescended to observe there
was a species of pulse called beans. As for ducks, she only considers
them in the light of furnishing dishes for the table. I am convinced
she has not looked into a duck’s nest, or fed the ducklings afterwards,
since she was herself a chick of five years old.’
In the meantime, in answer to Harry Stanhope’s fervent assurance that
he luxuriated in all country work and adored every kind of live stock,
Fan was saying, almost wistfully, she appeared so anxious that he
should not be disappointed in his ridiculous experiment, ‘And you will
not mind that you are tenant instead of landlord?’
‘Not a bit,’ answered sanguine Harry, who had not minded anything, save
not getting his play, since he was born.
Oliver was inclined to tax his sister with insincerity and with
indiscretion in pledging them to support Harry Stanhope in his
delusion, the moment the visitors left. But before he could begin, Fan,
still in high spirits, took his arm and walked him out to the garden.
Half of it was already in cold shadow, while in the other half the long
slanting rays of the sun were kindling the low beds of pink saponaria
into a rosy red, shining through the blue cups of the nemophila—warming
them to the tone of the summer sky, performing a fine process of
silvering on the white bells of the tall campanula.
‘Isn’t it jolly?’ demanded Fan, taking the first word, in her delight
departing from her correct Queen’s English, which was generally as
perfect as Becky Sharp’s French. ‘To think that two of your old college
friends should come and settle in this way on the very next farm to
us!’
Was it the simple rebound from the mortification with which she had
seen herself and him turned back to the old vulgar, illiterate circle
of the tradespeople of Friarton, which caused Fan to clutch at a straw,
and induced her to open her heart to the Stanhopes?
‘Nice!’ growled Oliver. ‘You are a nice sensible young woman to think
so. It will be the greatest nuisance going. In the first place, the
Stanhopes are not friends of mine—don’t run off with that big blunder
at starting. They were once in a reading-party under my charge—a
beastly drag they proved, and we nodded and exchanged a word or two in
the meadows or on the water from that time. That is the head and tail
of our friendship. Nobody but Harry Stanhope would have made a claim
upon it.’
‘But you acknowledged the claim at your own door,’ said Fan, quickly;
‘and are you not gratified by his turning farmer?’ she added,
innocently. ‘It is quite in your own way, and I admit that in him it is
romantic.’
‘In my way!’ cried Oliver, losing breath at the injustice of the
assertion; ‘in my way to intrude where I am not wanted! And you to
welcome romance! You, who boast you are the most matter-of-fact girl,
who defend the commonplace ambition to rise in life, to cut trade, to
go in for a profession—which requires a smattering of Greek and Latin,
or a speaking acquaintance with civil or ecclesiastical law, or with
drill and musketry—to wear a wig, or a cassock, or a red coat—the last
strictly on parade—without the smallest title to put on either—to
dine at seven or eight instead of one o’clock, and look down, with
the intense snobbery of a deserter from his ranks, on the class of
shopkeepers! You, Fan, who scout any ambition which has a wider scope
and a less selfish aim, and call it either high-flown or low-lifed,
equally despicable in both lights.’
‘But Mr. Stanhope is not proposing to be a shopkeeper,’ said Fan,
with narrow literalness; ‘and don’t you know a gentleman, a dozen
generations deep, can do anything?’ she asserted, defiantly, gathering
a cluster of heliotrope and smelling it.
‘It is the first time I ever heard such a sublime dogma from the lips
of anybody who fell short of being an idiot or a scamp,’ retorted
Oliver.
‘Oh! my dear, dear boy, how can you be so abominably rude?’ said Fan,
driven to laugh outright at his vehemence.
‘A gentleman’s birthright must be worth having,’ snorted Oliver,
still in towering indignation. ‘It is a pity he does not improve the
advantage oftener by doing something which deserves to be chronicled.
And if he fails, what can be expected from the _canaille_ who buy and
sell?’
‘Oliver, don’t pretend to misunderstand me,’ remonstrated Fan,
relapsing quickly after her short flight into her customary
earnestness—even with her proneness to feel aggrieved, getting angry on
her own account; ‘you know very well what I mean.’
‘I defy anybody to arrive at the meaning of so contradictory a person,’
said Oliver, growing cool as she waxed hot, picking up a stone and
aiming it at an audacious sparrow on a neighbouring bough.
‘You are perfectly aware,’ explained poor Fan, with laborious
iteration, ‘that I consider a man who has had the education of a
gentleman, and lived in the society of gentlemen, is qualified to
belong to their rank if he will.’
‘Thanks; I quite agree with you there; we only differ in what
constitutes a gentleman.’
‘Then let us agree to differ,’ said Fan, coming down from her stilts
for the moment, and making an overture towards reconciliation. ‘Don’t
quarrel any more this evening. I really want you to tell me if you
think Clarke is right in this border, for I can never make up my mind.’
Oliver’s opinion was at her service, as his hands and feet would have
been if she had cared to employ them. And he agreed with her that the
dispute had gone far enough, when it was assuming too sharp a tone.
That evening impressed itself on Oliver Constable’s mind, as certain
days and nights which, in themselves, at the time, have offered no
elements of distinction to arrest and excite us, stand out through
all our subsequent histories. He could recall each incident and
feature afterwards. The fact that he was the person to introduce the
two Stanhopes at Fan’s tea-table, the characteristics and doings
of the little incongruous group which gathered in the mill-house
parlour—fair-haired, broad-shouldered, sanguine Harry trotting out his
chimera; dark, narrow-chested, melancholious Horace leaning forward in
the shadow to catch Harry’s words, and his alone, content in the middle
of his natural scepticism to accept and act on Harry’s version of their
prospects; Fan’s rapid conversion to Harry’s views and the effect
his influence had on her; with Oliver himself playing the part of a
critical and condemnatory chorus to the others—all remained legibly
written on Oliver’s memory. And the second act in the garden was
preserved to his consciousness in the same involuntary manner. He did
not forget its smallest accessories—the low sunk sun touching the beds
and borders with a final glory, and shining dazzlingly in his eyes and
Fan’s, while she was unwontedly gay, and he quenched her gaiety by his
savageness. Yet the two had ‘fallen out’ and made it up again, as even
the most affectionate brothers and sisters will do, thousands of times
before, without the circumstances making the smallest mark on his mind.
Harry Stanhope was well accustomed to find himself a favourite with
women; and he was of an age and temperament which inclined him to repay
the obligation impartially and liberally. But there was a fascination
to Harry, little as he was accustomed to analysis, in the manner in
which Fan Constable’s dignified reserve melted at his approach into
a proportionate depth and wealth of cordiality. He had a perception
that the conquest of her formal coldness was not a common occurrence,
and was flattering to his bearing and address. And somehow the lad,
with his volatile disposition, had a capacity which Oliver Constable
did not possess, of fathoming and rightly estimating a woman’s nature.
Fan’s brother, who had known her all her life, might accuse her most
erroneously of changing like the wind; but the stranger, who had only
known her an hour, guessed, without being in fault, that steadfastness
was the key-note to her character.
‘A famous acquisition Constable’s turning up at Friarton Mill will be
to us,’ Harry announced complacently, if brokenly, between puffs of his
pipe, when he and Horace trudged over to such accommodation as had been
improvised for them at their farm. ‘We have fallen on our feet. There
is not only Constable, an old acquaintance and a man to be trusted—all
the more that he is apt to be as crusty as any governor’s port—there
is Miss Constable, an awfully nice girl and thunderingly ladylike to
boot. Upon my word, Horry, if millers’ daughters are like that, I
don’t wonder at fellows getting spoony and spouting verses about them,
and I do wonder at fine ladies holding their own. What a pair of eyes
she has got! as dark a brown as those of “Pin Him,”’ naming with fond
regret the supreme pet of the host of dogs which had in their time
called Harry master, which, having passed away from earth to the happy
hunting ground of dogs, was farther exalted in her late owner’s fond
imagination. It was an immense compliment from Harry when he compared
Fan’s eyes to the orbs of the departed ‘Pin Him,’ and when he added
with pensive meditativeness, ‘I dare say she would prove just such
another little brick in standing by her friends. How kind she was after
the first ten minutes!’
‘I think Constable might have had the hospitality to offer to put
us up for the night till the rest of our traps turned up,’ objected
Horace, querulously. The poor fellow had an unfortunate constitutional
instinct by which he invariably laid hold first of all the flaws
in an encounter, or an individual. ‘The sister ain’t a bouncing,
barn-door specimen of a woman such as one might have expected from the
surroundings. But it struck me there was rather too much starch and
buckram about her, to begin with, for good form—not to say the real
thing.’
‘Oh, come along, old Diogenes,’ cried Harry.
CHAPTER X.
OLIVER’S NOTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP.
OLIVER got into a habit of standing in his shop-door, leaning against
one or other of the door-posts. He stood there to keep his weaknesses
well in hand, as a declaration of war against all promulgators of
recognised theories of gentility, and as a proclamation of fraternity
and equality to his brother-shopkeepers. If he had known it, he was
rather a striking figure at the station he had chosen. He was a
Saul among the people. His shoulders were only rounded by his own
shrugs. His complexion was fresh and slightly weather-beaten, neither
tanned into leather nor baked into paste, nor faded into a girlish
delicacy. His hands, when he took them out of his pockets, were the
unbroadened, unflattened, well-kept hands of a man who for a period
of years has handled books chiefly, and only plied an oar or a foil,
and carried a rod or a gun, by way of that variety which has saved
his fingers from becoming either slender or plump. His feet showed
the effect of contact with the wares of a higher order of bootmaker
than any known in Friarton. The clothes Oliver had bought and paid
for from an Oxford tailor were not worn out, and though he meant to
replace them by the work of a Friarton tailor in all its integrity, it
was not to be supposed that even then he would be able to prevent an
imitative townsman doing his best to copy the University ‘cut;’ so that
Oliver, in spite of himself, would still wear suits which were a faint
reflection of the coats of the disciples of Poole.
Oliver was standing in this guise at his shop-door the next time he saw
the Stanhopes; and Harry called out again in the same tone of cheerful
curiosity, ‘I say, Constable, what are you about there?’
After his former experience, Oliver was pleased to find that now he did
not change colour—by the ghost of a shade. He simply moved a quarter
of an inch to enable himself to glance up at the sign above his head,
and call the Stanhopes’ attention to it—especially to the glittering
spot where the Christian name ‘Peter’ had been erased and replaced by
‘Oliver.’ ‘Was reading not included in your education?’ he enquired,
lazily.
It was Harry who grew red, gaped and stopped short, while Horace looked
sharply from the sign to Harry to get his cue from his prompter.
‘Come, now,’ stammered Harry, taken aback as he was, and speaking out
impulsively according to his wont, ‘this is too much to make us cram.
You don’t mean to say you’re a——’
‘A baker as well as a miller,’ suggested Oliver, with a laugh; ‘just
so. I wish I could say I was keeping shop—I am hardly good for so
much—but I’m looking after the premises and my business in a general
way.’
Harry stared, and then he swallowed the camel at a gulp, bursting out
into a laugh on his own account as he accomplished the feat. ‘All
right, old fellow,’ he took it upon him to assure Oliver; ‘I grow the
corn and you complete the process, not merely by grinding it, but by
going a step farther and converting it into food for man as well as
for beast—why should the service to the beast be regarded as more
honourable than that to the man? As well keep a shop here as a store in
Adelaide or Victoria. Look here, Constable, invite us in and give us a
tip of tarts.’
‘No,’ said Oliver, ‘my customers are the genuine article, and pay
for what they get—all save an exceptional small maid or man in rags,
who may be caught looking hungrily in at the windows. Your coats are
as good as mine, and I’ll swear you’ve had an excellent breakfast on
kidneys or mutton chops sufficient to spoil your youthful appetite for
tarts for some hours to come. But I’ll send one of my carts, in its
rounds, to call at the Farm and supply you with bread, if you like to
give me the order.’
‘And he expects us to say we are obliged to him for proposing to
furnish us with his goods on his own terms, and on short credit, no
doubt! We’ll see him hanged first, Horry. Is there any other baker in
the town, less of a wretched screw, that we can favour with our custom?
though of course we shan’t trust your report. I’ll tell you what,
Constable, we’ll run handicaps—my corn against your bread.’
‘You had better grow your crop first.’
‘Oh! never fear.’
Oliver could not help being amused by Harry Stanhope’s manner of taking
the discovery. The older man was touched a little, too, by the lad’s
staunchness to his new colours, his honest if spasmodic efforts to
accommodate himself to a changed order of things, in direct opposition
to every standard and watchword of the past, and to all the traditions
of his youth.
Upon the whole the new-comers, Harry Stanhope with Horace in his wake,
behaved a great deal better—Fan would have said in vindication of their
birth and breeding—than nearly the entire upper ten long resident in
Friarton, on Oliver Constable’s declining to avail himself of their
permission and his own power to join their order. Harry received the
shock, made up his mind to it, and went on as if nothing had happened,
and everything was the same as before. If Constable chose to be a
baker, of all trades, let him. For that matter, who could hinder
him? and what did it signify? Harry took it fully for granted that
Constable might still preserve all the claims he had ever had to being
a gentleman. Certainly Harry had not been in the habit of reckoning
bakers gentlemen, though he had known great brewers who were granted
the ‘Open sesame’ by his people. But he had enough modesty left to
own he and his people might have been mistaken in their partial and
arbitrary estimate. Unquestionably it helped Harry greatly in his
judgment to be sensible that he himself continued a gentleman, in spite
of his idle talk of going down in the social scale and sinking his coat
of arms and all ‘the humbug’ of his former station, in the plain style
and title of Harry Stanhope, yeoman.
The Wrights and Fremantles of Friarton said among themselves that
Oliver Constable had disappointed, nay, cheated them, in permitting
them to extend to him the right-hand of fellowship on false premises.
True, he had taken University honours as had been predicted of him,
but he was about to degrade these honours by sinking them in trade of
the most plebeian description. The fact was race, like murder, would
out. Young Constable came of generations of millers and bakers, instead
of masters of grammar schools and the like, and he must perforce return
to the hereditary calling with its substantial profits. It had not been
in scholarship to save him from his natural destiny.
Notwithstanding their just displeasure, Oliver’s old allies and patrons
did not at once give him the cut direct, to his face. As Mrs. Hilliard
had shrewdly defined the position, he could not rid himself in a
moment of the independent fortune his father had left him, and of his
university training. His going into trade might be a mere passing skit,
like the freaks of some other University men tinged with the craze
of doing something, at once out of the common and communistic, which
distinguished a few of the young scholars and geniuses of the era;
or it might be a simple step to winding up the business and getting
rid of it; or it might be feeling Oliver’s way to popularity with some
dim notion of getting into Parliament at a later date. If so, though
the fellow might be a dreaming scheming fool for his pains, it would
be a totally different kind of folly, which society could not afford
to condemn severely. And a mistake might be awkward. The Fremantles
and Co. could not be altogether sure of the motive at work, and, like
politic people, they were disposed to temporise and refrain for a
while from compromising themselves strongly. In addition the Friarton
magnates wondered a little how Constable would get on, how he would
manage to combine qualifications which the Wrights and Fremantles were
accustomed to consider far apart. In the dearth of sources of social
interest and excitement, Oliver’s former friends retained a great
curiosity, in the middle of their indignation and disgust, with regard
to his proceedings. Therefore ladies and gentlemen greeted him in his
new character blandly at first, and even made half-jesting allusions
to his having become what the speakers termed courteously a ‘business
man,’ just hinting that he would be a _rara avis_ among the common
shopkeepers at Friarton. The Wrights and Fremantles showed that it
would not be their fault if they did not drop young Constable—supposing
they were compelled to drop him—by imperceptible degrees, and with a
gentle decorum and consideration both for themselves and him.
But Oliver would not consent to be treated as a spectacle for men
and angels. When he found he was to be smilingly stared at, pumped
dry, and rallied, he broke off, rashly perhaps, his intercourse with
his old masters, and Fan, who had shown she was capable of bridling
her own pride and compelling it to go in harness, could not, in the
middle of her mortification, conquer her sore pride for Oliver so as to
make any effectual resistance to the renunciation of their connection
with professional and better-bred Friarton. Before Harry Stanhope had
appeared on the scene to change the current of her ideas and reinspirit
her, she had given in gloomily to Oliver’s determination to decline
the few and wary invitations extended jointly to the brother and
sister after Oliver’s return home, by the heads of the best houses in
Friarton. The would be hosts and hostesses took the unsatisfactory
couple at their word with a rapidity that savoured of relief.
‘The Constables know their own place best, after all,’ said the high
contending faction among themselves, with admirable candour. ‘We are
not going to force them to continue to come to our houses, when they
may have felt themselves not at home all the time, though we did what
we could to put these young persons at their ease.’
‘Constable has grown up an awkward brutally abrupt fellow, full of
angles and crotchets. He has nothing conciliatory about him,’ said
Mr. Fremantle, who was himself eminently gliding in his progress
through the world. ‘I don’t believe now, that he would ever get over
his original disadvantages—clever as he undoubtedly is—in a different
sphere. So, no doubt, he judges wisely in falling back into the old
track, where he may be as rude and overbearing as he likes. Probably
we erred in tempting him from it, though it seemed a pity that talents
like his should be wasted in a mill and bakehouse.’
‘And you know, my dear,’ said Mrs. Fremantle, who was by temperament
caressing, and in the absence of other channels for her social
affectionateness, became necessarily the bosom friend of Mrs. Wright,
though the two were only sympathetic on class grounds, ‘good schools
have not done everything for Miss Constable.’
‘Yes,’ answered Mrs. Wright. But in spite of her assent she was
a tiresome woman, in doubt about everything, given to argue the
conclusiveness of the plainest proposition. Thus she immediately turned
and contended. ‘But they were excellent schools. The plain old father,
and the brother with more ambitious views in those days, made a good
selection. Miss Constable was at a school at Norwood, where my cousin
Constantia’s daughters went afterwards, and she left it for Madame
Fléchier’s in Brussels, where Miss Hilliard’s nieces the Cholmondeley
girls finished their education. By-the-by,’ added Mrs. Wright, in
fresh helpless uncertainty, ‘they count some relationship with the
Constables.’
‘In a slightly nearer degree than we all do through Adam,’—Mrs.
Fremantle put up her chin impatiently. ‘It is only a whim of darling
Mrs. Hilliard’s to acknowledge it. As for Miss Constable’—the lady took
up the broken thread of her discourse—‘she is so cold and stiff, she
has got into such a habit of repressing herself—I suppose from having
been compelled to hold the other shopkeepers at arm’s length, it is
a positive effort to maintain an acquaintance with her; and where is
the use, when she will never let herself out so that one has no chance
of knowing her any better? It would be cruel to tease the Constables
further by going on—trying to draw them away from their old set, which
is quite respectable in its way. They may really be happier in it,
education or no education. We have given them the opportunity of coming
among us, and if we do not suit them, there is no more to be said. Of
course we shall still be on bowing and speaking terms, which may be a
little awkward when it leads to nothing more—otherwise I daresay it is
all for the best.’
Fan writhed under what she guessed of this result, and Oliver grinned
at it. But neither of the two did anything, after they had set the ball
moving, to prevent the catastrophe.
The single reservation in the sentence which consigned the
Constables once more to the Coventry of vulgar allies, occurred
in the case of Mrs. Hilliard. Her house was, as in the beginning,
the neutral ground on which the relapsed tradespeople could still
encounter the professional circle. Mrs. Hilliard had proclaimed her
blood-relationship with the Constables, while it was a point of honour
with her to assert openly her interest in the most distant of her
kindred. She announced now with the greatest _sang froid_, and with
a suspicion of gratified mischief, in the line she adopted—including
as she did the culprits among the recipients of the announcement—that
she did not mean to give Oliver and Fan Constable up, neither did she
mean them to give her up, since there were two at making a bargain and
picking a quarrel.
It is putting it mildly to say that Fan did not like Louisa Hilliard
and objected to being taken up by her, either on the score of remote
relationship or anything else; but the girl could not bring herself,
even with her strong dislikes, to reject the last refuge against
finding herself reduced solely to the society of the Dadds and the
Polleys.
Oliver rather enjoyed the broad tolerance of Mrs. Hilliard’s
self-indulgent _bonhomie_, and he had a hankering still after having
the entrance to the Meadows, though he availed himself of it to his own
hurt, smarting as he did under the total absence of sympathy there,
even more so than at home, from another Hilliard than Louisa.
Between Fan’s passiveness and Oliver’s treacherous inclinations, the
exception to the social ban was admitted, and Mrs. Hilliard carried her
point triumphantly as usual.
The tradespeople of Friarton could not be said to welcome with open
arms Oliver Constable’s return to their shops and back parlours. His
old acquaintances had liked him better than they had liked Fan, though
he had been of Fan’s mind once on a day, and had looked down from the
giddy heights of juvenile scholarship on the dull fat plains of trade,
vowing superciliously that he should never rest in them. But, oddly
enough, in proportion as Oliver became a man and changed his mind, his
early friends learnt to distrust him more and more. True, Oliver’s
recantation was received with shouts from young Dadd, chuckles from
old Dadd, and giggles from the Polley girls, as at a conquest won by
their class over that which pretended to be the superior rank. But
Oliver’s outward adherence did not flatter his fellows out of their
rooted conviction that he was not one of them, and might prove no
better than a traitor in the camp. He was ‘a chield’ preparing to come
among them, and take notes—not for the purpose of printing the notes,
which would have been disloyal enough—but, what was far worse, with
the intention of gauging the moral and intellectual condition of the
shop people, and with the conceited aspiration of elevating it. And
they had a strong objection to being thus elevated by a wolf in sheep’s
clothing—old Peter Constable’s son spoilt by his own college education.
He was giving himself out as intending to carry on his father’s trade,
which he was safe to make a mess of, while he was nourishing deep
designs under the cloak of the mill and the baker’s shop. He to be a
miller and baker! Old Dadd had heard Oliver could read Greek like a
parson, but he could no more throw off a covering of pie crust than
he could fly. Why, it was only the other day he was walking up the
High Street with his arm linked in Fremantle’s! Fremantle might be as
poor as a church-mouse and only a better sort of school usher, but he
could read the lessons in his white surplice on Sundays the same as the
Archbishop of Canterbury. Dadd went in for chapel, not church, still
even his minister owned that Fremantle was a cut above him in this
world. And there was Mrs. Fremantle in her shabby gown—that woman only
acknowledged the existence of such a female as Mrs. Dadd in the shop.
No doubt Mrs. Fremantle was as gracious as could be over the counter,
which was no less than her bounden duty, seeing the length of time her
bills stood in his books, still, in the middle of her graciousness, she
managed to convey the impression that his—Dadd’s—better half was of a
different order of creation from that which had the honour of claiming
Mrs. Fremantle as its product. Well, old Dadd, for his part, did not
object. He was aware that the Fremantles, for all their poverty and
shabbiness, dined at the squire’s table when he was at home, while Dadd
and Mrs. Dadd got no farther than the housekeeper’s room; and neither
did he wish to change places with the schoolmaster and his lady in this
respect. But let fish be fish, and fowl fowl—not ‘’alf and ’alf,’ as
Oliver Constable would have them.
Mrs. Hilliard was not wrong when she judged from her own feelings the
general disagreeableness of being dragged up to breathe a higher and
purer atmosphere.
At the same time, as may have been seen, the shop people, with their
plain common sense and shrewd wits—sharpened by jealousy, alarm, and
latent sluggish hostility—arrived more quickly and surely at Oliver’s
eccentric, high-flying views than the more cultivated portion of the
community puzzling over his meaning.
Oliver Constable laid himself out to gain old Dadd and induce his
senior to look upon him as a man and a brother. Oliver had patience
with the draper’s ways, including the loud stale jokes he poked at
Oliver as to his getting a wife and Fan’s finding a husband. According
to Dadd’s ideas, courtship in some form was the one engrossing concern
of all young people—after the attention which the young man was bound
to pay to his trade and the pleasure the girl might take in her smart
clothes and her outings, which, to be sure, were adjuncts to the main
business of her life. Indeed Dadd looked charitably to a suitable
marriage for Oliver Constable as the most likely cure for the lad’s
folly. Certainly young Dadd, who was several years Oliver’s senior,
remained a bachelor. But his father explained the contradiction by
rubbing his hands and accusing Jack of being ‘a sad dog’ among the
ladies.
Jack blustered out, ‘What nonsense, guv’ner! Anyone might tell I had
not much to say to the girls by the looks of me,’ clearly regarding the
charge as made out and as a feather in his cap. Even his mother, in her
sleek demureness, seemed to agree with him.
Oliver manfully stood the ‘heavy teas’ under which the Dadds’ table
groaned. He ate gallantly the fat bacon and pickled salmon in order
that his entertainers, like John Gilpin’s neighbours, might not say
he was proud. He did not faint at the sight, or smell, of the raw
onions, to which the whole Dadd family were partial. He did not throw
down his arms and fly when gin-and-water succeeded tea, and added
its contribution to the already salient odours of the back parlour.
Luckily, Oliver had a good digestion and a robust constitution; and
though the details had not to him the fascination of novelty which
they might have possessed for Harry Stanhope, neither were they the
exaggerated offences which they had proved to Fan in her craving for
outward refinement. It goes without saying that Oliver was free from
the affected, effeminate horror of the small pretender to gentility,
the snob who, having just cast his native coarse slough, has wriggled
himself into a new coat of superfine delicacy and fastidiousness.
Oliver rather respected the Dadds for not altering their ordinary style
of hospitality out of compliment to what they might imagine his changed
habits and tastes.
The Dadds’ independence saved Oliver the trouble—which worried him
at the Polleys, of having perpetually to rebut the attacks which
Mrs. Polley with her high spirit made on his supposed conversion to
fine living. Mrs. Polley would not—any more than old Dadd—deign to
accommodate herself to Oliver Constable’s presumed new standard, but
she would persist in bringing it up in the form of testy apologies for
the deprivations he had to suffer. ‘Of course, our teas ain’t like
the meals you’ve been accustomed to, Mr. Oliver,’ she always began,
exasperatingly. ‘French cooks and a dozen courses, I dare say, no less
will serve you now—I am sure I pity your sister—and your choice of
wines every day. All I can say for our poached eggs and fried mackerel
is they are new laid and I know the hens as laid them, while the fish
is fresh and done to a turn, though I say it that should not. They are
honest English dishes honestly come by and paid for.’
Then the girls would giggle and protest. ‘Oh! mother!’ in chorus. And
’Mily, the youngest and most forward of the sisters, would toss her
elaborately dressed head and cry, ‘I hope you are not hard to please,
Mr. Oliver; I should never put myself about to cosset any man. There!’
At last the poor creature the father, whose wife had stood in the
breach, and prevented him from dragging down the family to ruin, would
edge in his word and declare solemnly—not without a timid attempt at
pleasing his mistress, who was not great enough to forget what she had
done for him—‘Missus Polley never did go in for kickshaws or waste; she
always was a one to prefer what was plain and satisfying.’
In return for the tribute cast at her feet, Mrs. Polley would look
round with complacent contempt, and charge her husband: ‘You shut up,
Polley, and eat your victuals; you know you have a trick of keeping the
table waiting. I am glad none of the gals take after you, unless it be
Liza—soft thing! Slow at meat is slow at work. You may be thankful I
never were a dawdler, and that I went in—the greater fool I—for looking
after you.’
Whereupon poor Mr. Polley would subside into silence and the munching
of his food as fast as his few teeth would go.
And the girls would titter afresh and cry again, ‘Oh! mother!’ in
another round of family applause. Only Liza would protest against
the accusation of procrastination—particularly where her favourite
‘beverage’ was in question. They all knew, Liza said—almost as solemnly
and pompously as her father spoke—that she could sip tea morning, noon,
and night. There was no substitute for it—unless lemonade.
‘Or beer—especially when Jack Dadd is having a glass,’ suggested ’Mily,
flippantly.
The result of the impertinence was that the two sisters began to
dispute together with painful frankness and vigour as to which of
them paid least heed to Jack Dadd and his actions, till Mrs. Polley,
who took and kept the high constable tone in her family, called the
noisy pair to order, as it were, with a wave of her truncheon, and an
imperious, ‘Be quiet, gals! Don’t be two sillies putting up your backs
before Mr. Oliver.’
But although Dadd the draper was brought to discuss with Oliver, in
the character of a fellow-tradesman, the general principles of sales,
profits, ready money discount, long credit, bad debts, the danger of
the co-operative system, apprentices, journeymen, hours of closing and
holidays, the cautious veteran would no more approach, in the course
of conversation, his individual practice in such debatable doings as
a percentage to the seller on each day’s sales, or with regard to
so-called ‘bankrupt stocks,’ ‘damaged goods,’ ‘clearing-off sales,’
‘ready-made work done on the premises,’ than he would have spoken
of these trade mysteries to the vicar, Mr. Houghton, or Dadd’s own
minister, Mr. Holland.
Moreover, old Dadd would say ‘sir’ in addressing his young
fellow-townsman. Mrs. Dadd was quite as mannerly, with a certain
folding of the hands and falsetto tone of voice which took the place
of the twinkle in her husband’s eye and his sturdy accents, in their
common politeness; and so long as that small term of half-ironical
respect came in with every alternate sentence from the two, Oliver had
scanty hope of gaining ground with them.
Jack Dadd was not unwilling to be seen walking along the High Street
with Constable of Friarton Mill, late of St. Bodolph’s, Oxford
University, or standing with him at their respective shop-doors. Jack
went farther: he slapped his old school-fellow and brother-tradesman
on the shoulder at parting with a resounding slap, which Oliver bore
unflinchingly, though he did not return it. The young draper addressed
the miller and baker as ‘Noll,’ in the hearing of the Polley girls, and
Oliver answered cheerfully the free abbreviation of his Christian name;
yet, though Oliver was anxiously wary in his intercourse with Jack, and
scrupulously avoided the most distant reference to printed matter which
was not in the ‘Friarton News,’ all the same, Jack had continually
present to him his own literary deficiencies, especially in the
rudimentary branches of grammar and spelling. What was lacking in the
last might have escaped detection for the present, but the culprit had
a guilty conviction that Constable would somehow guess that he—Jack—was
never sure in writing a letter when he ought or ought not to double his
consonants, or to introduce an _e_ after a _b_ or an _l_ or a _t_. And
Jack had an inward uncomfortable impression that a college swell must
look down upon him for such a weakness; even though Constable might be
a big enough swell, or a sufficiently artful dodger, not to brandish
his superior advantages in Jack’s face.
It is by no means pleasant to be haunted by a sense of inferiority even
in so small a matter. And Jack Dadd was not accustomed to submit to
such an experience.
Till Oliver came home, Jack had swaggered and crowed a good deal over
the young men of his class in Friarton and the neighbourhood.
Old Dadd was well-to-do, and Jack was an only child. Of course he was
not like an ordinary young man in the drapery line to which he had been
bred. He was the young master and successor to a good business.
But now Jack Dadd began to fear that Oliver Constable—queer fish and
out of the water as he was—would cut Jack out with some of his most
ardent admirers. In taking up his father’s trade Oliver had still
retained his reputation for wonderful cleverness and learning, above
all for that swell’s tone of consideration, tolerance, and gentleness
which qualified Constable’s bluntest ways, and of which none had a
keener perception than poor Jack, who lacked it utterly. Girls were
so foolish and vain, always caught by novelty and gentility. No doubt
Oliver Constable was not a gentleman born, any more than the rest of
them could boast of being lords’ and squires’ sons. What was more, he
had farther diminished his claims to being a gentleman by choosing to
work—at least to have a mill and a bakehouse and shop, instead of to
live idle and take his pleasure out of the fortune old Constable had
left, as Jack felt certain he would have done in Oliver’s place.
Still, when all was said, Constable was the nearest thing to a
gentleman that would cross the path of girls in Jack’s circle, and Jack
reflected the girls would make the most of Oliver, and he would become
the rage.
That goose Liza Polley, who pretended to read collections of poetry,
would be making a hero of Constable, and that minx ’Mily would be
treating the fellow to some of her sauce.
Jack, on his part and speaking impartially, was disappointed in
Constable’s abilities and attainments. It was all very well to admit
that Oliver Constable had got a fine education and had not become an
insolent shaver on the strength of it. Hang him! he was too near the
real Mackay for that. But actually he did not know anything worth
caring about. He could not put Jack up to a single wrinkle on any point
he was interested in, with regard to which Constable had been in a
position to have become a valuable authority if he were not a noodle in
some respects.
Jack had sought to balance the effeminate nature of his daily
occupations in matching skeins of silk and turning over gloves, by
an excess of manliness in his recreations. He went in strongly for
games and sport. He could not often get away to attend a morning or
an afternoon cricket match, for his father had old-fashioned strict
notions of what was due to business and business hours. Therefore
Jack’s pink and white complexion lost the chance of being tanned brown.
But he played cricket and bowls with a club of Friarton shopkeepers
every fine evening all the summer. He took in ‘Bell’s Life;’ he kept
a bull-terrier, and sometimes managed to engage it in a ratting match.
And he betted as regularly on the Derby and the Oxford and Cambridge
boat-race as if he had driven more than once in his life to Epsom
Downs, wearing a green veil and scattering flour on the way, or as if
he had a hereditary association with either University.
Jack found Oliver Constable, for all his so-called attainments,
lamentably behind him in the important matters referred to. Oliver
could play cricket decently indeed, but he could do so when he was a
boy. And it was only by dragging what information there was to get,
word by word, out of him, that a Friarton cricketer could ascertain how
the nobs at the University played their game. Constable did not read a
sporting paper. He had not been in the habit of betting, though he did
not preach a sermon against the practice, possibly he meant his silent
example to serve as a text. Altogether, and this was a consolation, if
he said as little to the girls about the college spreads and blow-outs,
he might not take the wind out of Jack’s sails to the extent he had
apprehended. But the deficiency certainly rendered Oliver less of an
acquisition to his old acquaintances.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Transcriber Notes
Hyphens standardised across text.
The following are corrections to the original text.
p11 close quote removed from (pleasure to look at.)
p36 “distinugish” changed to (distinguish third- or).
p69 close quote added to (at your heels.’)
p81 close quote added to (scholar and gentleman.’)
p97 “downfal” changed to (downfall of all the).
p98 period changed to comma (familiar mill gallery,)
p111 period added to (‘Oh, Oliver, think again.’)
p112 close quote added to (are going to do,’)
p181 single changed to double quote (“he is my servant)
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