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Title: Oliver Constable, miller and baker, Vol. 2 (of 3)
Author: Sarah Tytler
Release date: March 28, 2026 [eBook #78315]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1880
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78315
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLIVER CONSTABLE, MILLER AND BAKER, VOL. 2 (OF 3) ***
Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
VOL. II.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
MILLER AND BAKER
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOL. II.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1880
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
XI. OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD 1
XII. HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A
YEOMAN 27
XIII. OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS
CLASS 56
XIV. THE FIRST ATTEMPT 76
XV. THE ANNUAL EXCURSION 101
XVI. THE MIDDLE AND END OF THE FEAST 127
XVII. AGNETA STANHOPE 147
XVIII. OLIVER’S LECTURE ON WORDSWORTH 165
XIX. AN ILLUSION 194
XX. OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL
CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED
OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND
CO. 221
XXI. MUTINY IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE 253
XXII. A REFORMER’S REWARD 272
OLIVER CONSTABLE,
_MILLER AND BAKER_.
CHAPTER XI.
OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD.
Oliver was happy enough to discover, in the course of an evening call
which Jack Dadd paid at the mill-house, that Jack had turned his mind a
little in the direction of the rearing of vegetables, and the training
and bearing of fruit trees. He had a voice in making the best of his
father’s garden. His own name had appeared in the list of successful
competitors at the Horticultural Show.
‘Your blockhead of a gardener is making a mess of these artichokes, and
your medlar don’t carry half the crop it ought to;’ Jack found fault in
his free and easy style, as Oliver and he were strolling in the garden,
while Fan sat in solitary dignity within doors.
‘Very likely,’ Oliver answered, philosophically at first; and then he
proposed quickly, ‘Give us a lesson, Dadd?’
‘You ain’t above taking it,’ said Jack Dadd, nodding, ‘though your ass
of a man may be. But you don’t suppose I’m going to put a spoke in my
own wheel, by telling you how to be my successful rival at the show?’
Jack was not in earnest in his refusal, for he was naturally obliging
and good-natured, while dealing with customers who were mostly women
gave him a habit of civility. But he considered it smart and out of
shop to appear knowing, selfish, and blustering, just as he reckoned
it spirited and dashing to use bad language on occasions, without
entering much into the meaning of the words. Oliver had fallen out of
knowledge of the lad, and was not certain either of his simplicity or
his affectation, so he changed a little in his tack.
‘What would you say to setting up a field naturalists’ society in
Friarton, and having occasional excursions to furnish a correct
catalogue of the flora of this district of England—not a bad district
for the purpose?’ suggested Oliver.
Oliver’s mind had gone off to a version of the pursuit of herbs in
which there should be only the mildest species of rivalry. ‘If we were
to tramp whole days,’ he said to himself sanguinely, after what he half
hoped was an inspiration, ‘over pastures, through woods, and down the
centre of ditches, crying “Eureka!” with one consent, when we came upon
an outlying specimen of nettle, we should assuredly hob-nob together
before we had gone out three times.’
‘Oh! bother, no,’ said Jack, throwing a bucketful of cold water on the
first spark of the project. ‘There is some sense in growing vegetables
and fruit, and even garden flowers—though the breakjaw names of the
last is enough to stop the business—I mean, of course, the last things
out in the flower line, for nobody cares about the poor old things that
had no show along with their scent, like cottage bonnets and short
skirts, which mother will tell you were so modest and tidy. But to take
the trouble to hunt up and nickname weeds, I call sheer waste of body
and mind, fit only for pottering gentlefolks, schoolmasters, and fogies
of that kidney, or for your would be geniuses among the working-men.
You would have a pretty sprinkling of the lowest ruck wanting an excuse
to be off from a day’s work, and expecting you to pay them for joining
your society. I tell you, Constable, it don’t pay—either him or anyone
else—to take a working-man from his work and set him up as a genius.
Just you see how it would answer with your bakers. Besides, I, for one,
don’t care for being mixed up with every blacksmith and carter who
takes it into his conceited noddle that he has a turn for gathering
weeds and storing trash.’ And Jack strutted a little as he walked, and
puffed out his pink and white cheeks.
‘You are wrong,’ maintained Oliver, ‘and more’s the pity for the other
ways in which a working-man spends his holiday. But look here, Jack,
you meet him in the cricket-field?’
‘Oh! that is different,’ said young Dadd, carelessly. ‘That is an
understood thing. But as for my club, we have only a young weaver and
a shoemaker or two able to bat and bowl at our evening practice. The
working-man who lives by his cart-horse sinews is mostly too tired for
any place save the alehouse, after six o’clock.’
In spite of the slightness of the encouragement he had received,
Oliver did feel his way to originating a field naturalists’ society.
He sounded his own millers and bakers, and discovered no Robert Dick
among them; none went in for weeds. However, in his search, Oliver hit
on a stalwart journeyman in his service, who had a small taste for
butterflies. Oliver himself had no elegant scientific bent in this
direction, but he introduced his baker to the ancient keeper of an
ancient, dusty, mouldy, and well-nigh forgotten museum in the town.
True, the keeper, in the neglect and oblivion which had fallen upon his
charge, had lapsed into hopeless indifference and absolute infidelity
to his trust: but he was sufficiently moved by the strange event of a
visitor—a pupil—however humble, to the museum, not only to furbish up
the remains of what had once been a creditable display of native and
foreign butterflies, in the entomological cases, he showed a salutary
sense of shame, by volunteering to make a report to the survivors of
the committee, who had mismanaged the affairs of the museum, for the
purpose of inducing them to employ a portion of the small fund which
still remained at their disposal, to pay the young baker to replace the
native ‘peacocks’ and ‘emperors,’ that had dropped and crumbled from
their pins.
Oliver fondly flattered himself that he had done some good in
this quarter. But unfortunately, the big young baker was of a
self-conscious, sensitive disposition. He was abashed by the sudden
favourable notice of a pursuit, which, though he had fallen into it,
he had always been accustomed to look upon as very much the childish
folly his companions held it to be. He allowed himself to be overcome
by the half-jealous chaff which went on in the shop at the result of
the jeering information which some of the men had volunteered to give
their master. The unfortunate admirer of butterflies began to hate the
mention even of a beetle or a bumble-bee. He doggedly declined to
have anything to do with refilling the cases in the museum. He showed
Oliver, in a nervous but unmistakable manner, that the man would have
none of the master’s sympathy, and took refuge in the skittle-ground
nearest to his lodgings, that he might not be tempted into the
fields, and betrayed into the absurdity of butterfly-hunting, thus
destroying the _esprit de corps_ between him and his brother-bakers,
and alienating them from his side. Oliver’s small amount of good
done effervesced in harm. And when a letter in the ‘Friarton News’
only bore the fruit of several more or less cordial and enthusiastic
replies from those ‘pottering gentlefolks,’ schoolmasters, and a
working-man or two, of whom Jack Dadd had spoken, Oliver withdrew
from the scheme, leaving the members who had suggested themselves to
render it an accomplished fact and to include in the society—if they
had the wisdom to extend their bounds in that direction, all the idle
young ladies in the neighbourhood—who were not too fastidious, or
too delicate, or too lazy to enter the ranks, and to take to making
herbariums, in place of playing incessant games of croquet, badminton,
or lawn-tennis, whichever happened to be in the ascendant, alternately
with district-visiting under the last fascinating curate. They were
very well qualified to do this work without him. Oliver was sensible
that he might incur the reproach of not knowing his own mind. But he
did know it well enough not to be diverted, by a specious and rather
agreeable prospect, from his proper purpose. If none of the Dadd and
Polley set could be drawn out to study botany, he would let it alone
for the present.
The next bright idea which struck Oliver was to join Jack Dadd’s
company of volunteers—not that Jack was their captain, but he was an
influential member of the corps. He was a tolerably smart soldier, a
fair shot, proud of his uniform and of what he had learnt of drill. He
might be a greater man in the volunteer ball-room than at a sham fight,
but he was honestly possessed with the notion that he was serving his
country and forming part of her martial bulwark. For that matter he
occasionally terrified his mother by swaggering and threatening, after
a tiff with his father, to join any reserved force which should be
called abroad.
Oliver was perfectly aware that he could never be what Jack called ‘a
dab’ of a soldier, but he was not sure that Jack would not like him
the better for his defects. It would be a great nuisance and fatigue
to Oliver to walk and hold himself straight and still, like other
men, and not to be perpetually in disgrace, but he might try what he
could accomplish in bodily self-restraint. It would be what moralists
would call ‘good discipline’ for him, at any rate. At the same time
he remembered, and even reminded Fan of what he had said to her on the
evening of his coming home, as to his being out of place in a barrack
yard.
Fan was not too generous to refrain from assenting with grave irony,
though she had no particular objection to his joining the company
of volunteers, which included men of all ranks, if only Oliver had
asserted his claims and got a commission—not put himself on a level
with young Dadd. ‘Jack Dadd is odious,’ Fan had said with effusion to
Oliver one day, as she recalled the young draper’s loud trousers, tight
boots, and ‘light kids,’ when he figured as a ‘Sunday swell.’ Fan also
cherished lively recollections of what she had suffered from Jack Dadd
on the occasion of a party at the Polleys, which she had been forced to
attend soon after leaving school. Jack would not be kept at a distance
by any effort of girlish majesty, and when he had happened to sit next
to her, he had presumed to administer sundry nudges with his elbow
to emphasise points in his conversation, without regard to her stony
disregard of the signals.
‘Not a bit,’—Oliver denied the odiousness stoutly; ‘Dadd is not half a
bad fellow; he is manly in his way, and though that way may not be good
form,’ reflected Oliver, falling inadvertently into school slang, ‘it
is not altogether his fault, poor beggar.’
Oliver paid heavy penalties for his ambition, in the Masonic
Hall—converted for the nonce into a drill hall—and in the
five-acre field, where the volunteers went through their exercise.
Discipline alone prevented Jack Dadd and his cronies from roaring and
rolling about with laughter at the recruit’s disqualifications and
misdemeanours. After many evenings’ enforced attendance and irksome
drudgery, at the hall and in the field, and a journey along with some
scores of excited men cooped up in the insufficient accommodation of
a limited number of railway carriages, followed by a march of several
miles through clouds of dust in order to perform a series of wildly
entangled evolutions, before a general officer, who smiled grimly at
the performance, and marked out Oliver for particular reprobation,
Oliver counted disconsolately his gains from the extensive sacrifice
of his leisure. He was on easier terms with Jack Dadd and the rest,
since they had at least one more subject in common. He was invited as a
matter of course, and had, indeed, a right, to join the others in what
Jack called their ‘watering,’ and which might more appropriately have
been styled their ‘beering,’ and their occasional little suppers at
the inns they affected after drill. These young men of the people were
not dissipated fellows farther than what was implied by the fact that
certain members, like Jack, were inclined to aspire to a flavour of
dissipation as an element in manliness. Their gambling was to a very
limited extent, though it might reach to the bottom of their slenderly
lined purses, in stakes of small silver at the billiard table, which
an enterprising Friarton innkeeper had provided for them, as well as
for their betters, in addition to cribbage boards and packs of cards.
The noise and riot into which the high spirits of the company broke out
at times might be a little coarse, but it was not more outrageous than
the mad nonsense which Oliver had witnessed, and, sober-minded as he
was for the most part, had joined in, occasionally, when well-bred lads
met in each other’s rooms on the banks of the Isis. For that matter,
its utterance served in both cases as a safety-valve for the exuberance
of life, the joy in existence, which soon enough expends itself and is
replaced by a burden of care, worry and weariness, even when men stop
short of bitterness of heart and despair of spirit.
The pity was that though there were no deans and proctors at Friarton,
and though the intervention of the rural Charlies or Bobbies might not
be called for, the public of the little town was at once more lynx-eyed
and sterner in its judgments. There was far less allowance made for
the young plebeians than for the young patricians. Unaccountably and
inconsistently, much more was expected from the former than from the
latter. Old heads on young shoulders were unhesitatingly demanded in
many quarters in the case of the embryo tradesmen, with their poor
education, and their slender resources by comparison for occupying
their leisure hours. It was hard to say why this inequality of opinion
existed, unless the early call of these young shopmen to earn their
bread by the sweat of their brow, and the hand-to-hand struggle of
some of them with poverty and privation from their cradles upwards,
might be supposed, by an austere necessity, to steady and dignify the
lads betimes, not to drive them desperate and impel them to snatch
greedily at any small indulgence, however base and fatal, which came
within their reach. If this were the explanation, an exceptional though
perilous honour was conferred on ‘the counter-jumpers’ when they were
expected to be wiser than their fellows.
For Oliver was certain of one thing, that if any draper’s assistant, or
saddler or ironmonger’s apprentice, in Friarton happened to be simply
intoxicated, not so much with strong drink as with the restless energy
and furious mirth of youth in an ebullition that would be treated with
tolerant tenderness at a university, and punished by nothing worse
than the mild reproof or the nominal fine, which was a trifle light
as air to the privileged undergraduate, the young tradesman would be
generally set down as drunk with less ethereal liquor. If caught in
the act of creating a disturbance so heinous as waking the silent
night with hideous clamour, giving chase to a surprised, surrounded,
and hustled guardian of the public peace, smashing wantonly a street
lamp, or wrenching off ‘maliciously’ a bell or knocker, he would be
hailed before a bench of magistrates, and mulcted of a sum out of
all proportion to his exchequer. And that was not all. He would have
to pay what was for him a far heavier penalty. His character, which
was his capital, his chief dependence for work and livelihood, would
suffer. His employer, though he had been young himself once, would be
so influenced by the magisterial verdict as to begin to lose confidence
in his assistant. The inspector of the Sunday or night school in which
the lad might have been religiously enough inclined, and sufficiently
benevolent to take an interest and have a class, would sharply signify
to the offender that he was no credit to the institution, and had
better give up his connection with it. The clergyman, receiving
the report of the inspector, would not think himself justified in
interfering; on the contrary, he, too, would commence to look coldly
on his young parishioner. The lad, sunk in his own estimation by the
judgment of those he had respected and who ought to know best, slinking
away from their condemnation to seek refuge with his fellow-sinners,
who could not at least set their faultlessness against his errors,
might become the dog with a bad name in a fair way to be hung.
Oliver Constable did not see how the unequal dispensation of justice
was to be made even, but he smarted under the sense of it. The smart
tempted him to act very much after the fashion of the great Dr. Johnson
when the young bucks for whom he had a kindly regard invaded his room
at midnight and summoned him to a lark. In like manner and with less
solicitation, Oliver remained many an evening in the society of Jack
Dadd, and of lads with even fewer hostages to respectability than Jack,
and went with them—careless of what people said of his, Oliver’s,
taste—in the young tradesmen’s senseless but harmless enough raids
through the town, because Oliver Constable believed that his presence
was a protection to the others, even more than a check on their erratic
proceedings; yet in return for the double support, Oliver’s _protégés_
to a great extent fought shy of him.
In these boyish demonstrations in which he chose to bear a part,
Oliver had not the relief of cultured cleverness, some development
of which had usually been intermingled with the ‘great fun’ and
‘awful jolliness’ of a gathering of university lads, whose rollicking
propensities had not been altogether toned down by blue china and
sage-green _portières_. If at a certain stage of the entertainment,
missiles would fly about, howls be resorted to, and batterings of the
door indulged in, at another there would occur lively mimicry of the
Union speeches; parodies of old classic odes would carry the mind back
to Greek and Roman feasts; viewiest of views—transcending the most
extravagant speculations of ancient and modern philosophy—would be
aired, and would serve at least to show that the young revellers had
inherited thoughts and fancies, however crude, as well as the rampant
spirits of their years.
But here among the youth of Friarton, which was not golden, or even
gilded, a bad style of practical joking and buffoonery—gone out
elsewhere save in the worst style of regiment; the boisterous rendering
of the mock heroic and still more excruciating comic songs of the
lower order of theatres; and a good deal of rude wrangling for lack of
a better mode of argument, traversing the horse-play and threatening
now and then to terminate in the rowdyism of a free fight, formed the
sole alternatives to sheer noise. These young shopmen, who were very
ordinary lads, were nearly a century behind their social superiors in
superficial civilisation. Oliver used to compare his class sorrowfully
to those nations in Europe like the Poles and Hungarians kept back to
do the needful work of repelling the hordes of Eastern barbarians, and
apparently never able to make up for lost time.
Oliver Constable did not for a moment imagine that the upper classes
enjoyed a monopoly or even a predominance of moral and intellectual
gifts. But the truth was pressed home upon him painfully, that while
genius, which is above all accident of circumstances, and which is
its own teacher, is rare, cultivation tells in producing a higher
average of second-rate ability, or the specious appearance of it, in
the better educated grades of society. And where the _matter_ is not
of the best, the _manner_ always plays an overweening part. There did
not happen to be a ‘mute inglorious Milton’ in Friarton in those days,
so Oliver missed the intelligent echoes of the Marvels and Butlers of
the period, which he had been accustomed to hear at Oxford. Even with
their aid he had been apt to get tired of youthful gaieties, and to
call them intolerably flippant and shallow, but, in contrast with his
former experience, the clumsy gambols of the Friarton lads were dull
as ditch water. Oliver could not have stood them long, had it not been
for the strength of his purpose and that higher humanity which awoke in
him such sympathy with his kind, above all with the class in which it
seemed to Oliver his chief responsibilities were to be found.
It was slow uphill work to win influence and lull antagonism. Jack Dadd
had made use, more than once in Oliver’s hearing, of bad language.
Happily for Jack himself, he had no real relish for it; he employed it
as an evidence of knowingness and spirit in the light in which many
swearers indulged in profane swearing in the great swearing age. Some
melancholy prophets report there are ominous symptoms, in high places,
of the return of this epoch, but we must humbly trust that the blooming
time of blasphemy was a century ago.
At last Oliver interfered: ‘Dadd, will you do me the favour not to say
that again in my hearing?’ Oliver requested, quietly.
‘Oh! hang it, Constable, we are not to have any preaching or dictating
from you,’ cried young Dadd, colouring up and blustering. ‘If you don’t
like our ways, leave ’em alone. We shan’t cringe for your company, of
which you have made us a gift, without our asking for it, I may say.’
‘I have not preached or dictated; I appeal to the rest of you fellows,’
said Oliver, without much loss of temper; while the fellows, who had
their share of the old English passion for fair play, felt constrained
to mumble an assent to the appeal even though it was against the
deliverance of their comrade. ‘I asked you to drop that expression as
a favour to me,’ repeated Oliver; ‘if you cannot grant the favour, at
least you may refuse civilly.’
‘Oh! if you choose to put it in that fashion,’ said Jack, a little
sulkily, ‘there is no more to be said; all I meant to object to was any
fine fellow’s thinking to come it over us, which I never heard he was
invited to do, and taking it upon him to bid us mince our words to suit
his delicate stomach.’
But Jack soon forgot his pique, and he made the concession of not
repeating the offence within sound of Oliver’s ears, whatever he
might utter beyond their reach. Possibly the censure had sunk so far
into Jack’s somewhat obtuse mind, that he was rather shaken in the
conviction of the embellishment, supplied to his conversation by his
sporting the grossest form of oath with which he was acquainted. He
might even fall into the innocent delusion of supposing that ugly
expletives had ceased to be hurled right and left, in moments of
excitement, by choice specimens—according to Jack Dadd’s ideas—of
young swells at the universities.
And Jack, with all his pertness and swagger, was not original. He
secretly imitated the social superiors he admired and envied in his
heart of hearts, while, on the one hand, he was professing among his
own set supreme indifference to their claims, and on the other, he knew
his own interest too well not to solicit their custom and attend to
their needs with the utmost civility.
For poor Jack played a double, nay, a quadruple part. In place of
simply regarding his more aristocratic patrons with that combination
of proper official outward respect, and individual inward contempt,
which his father and mother entertained for them, Jack’s mind was
farther divided between the two emotions of loving and loathing equally
smothered and nearly equally balanced.
He appreciated keenly, he was impelled to ape, the alluring
practices of the very gentlefolks who galled him by making use of
him, and, in the case of the younger generation, regarding him with
the easy carelessness and laughing scorn, which had replaced the
tyranny and arrogance of one decade, and the stately countenance
and elaborate benevolence of another. But in the middle of Jack’s
small applause and the compliment of his taking his antagonists for
models, his good-nature did not keep him from grinding his teeth at
their disparaging treatment culminating in the mocking epithet of
‘counter-jumper.’
CHAPTER XII.
HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A YEOMAN.
Harry Stanhope was welcomed with open arms by everybody in Friarton,
and Horace was more than tolerated for his brother’s sake. Fan
Constable had struck the key-note of public opinion in this England
which some people call democratic, when she said that a gentleman
‘generations deep’ could do anything, always supposing he did it with
characteristic grace, and win golden opinions on all sides. What Oliver
Constable was condemned and ostracised for attempting to do, because
he did it out of loyalty to his class, a deep sense of duty to his
kind, and the most practical form of Christianity, Harry Stanhope was
universally applauded and caressed for trying to accomplish in his
burlesque fashion in an idle whim, certainly with no other motive, save
that of serving himself and Horry.
It was no matter that Harry far outdid Oliver in the liberty he took
with the world of Friarton. Oliver only went to his mill and his
shop, seeking to revive his old familiarity with business details,
and planning how to bring to bear upon them his version of trade
principles. He contented himself with reviving his acquaintance with
old friends of the family in a conventional enough way, simply making
it plain that he acknowledged their obligations and was content to take
his place in their ranks.
But Harry flaunted his descent from the squirearchy to the yeomanry in
the most outrageous style. He ‘went the whole hog,’ as he had said. He
was like the stage misanthropes who growl and gibe till men doubt their
sincerity, only Harry’s blue eyes were too round and limpid for one to
suspect them of depths of hypocrisy. He meant everything he did while
the fit was upon him. He was in earnest so far as he knew, when, like
hermits in general, he went far beyond the original professors in his
actions.
Harry with his shadow, Horace, not only dined at twelve, sometimes in
the fields in close proximity to his workers, and supped at seven,
he made his own hay, whether the sun shone or the rain fell—not to
the benefit of the hay in the latter instance, drove his own carts,
galloping the cart-horses to the injury of these sober-minded animals,
and led the hoers among beans and turnips with an impartial energy
which threatened to demolish alike crops and weeds. He laid aside the
civilised encumbrance of a morning coat, as if he were engaged in
perpetual cricketing and rowing matches. He walked with a pitchfork
over his shoulder as some squires carry a spud, when the tool was
quite unnecessary. And he did what no yeoman within a radius of many
miles of Friarton had thought of doing within the memory of the oldest
inhabitant—he came into the town in character, in his shirt-sleeves,
riding a bare-backed horse, as he had been taking it to water, when
it had flashed across his mind that he might be in time to intercept
the post letters—not that Harry’s letters were of any particular
consequence, either to himself or other people—or that he ought to
look after a job which was in progress for him at the saddler’s or the
smith’s. He actually astounded the assembled Friarton market, he did
not scandalise it—nothing which Harry could do did scandalise his
neighbours—by entering it in such primitive guise. He had made up his
mind, to begin with, that to be a yeoman at Copley Grange Farm was the
same as being a colonist, and the more he brought his establishment
and personal practice to what Harry conceived to be the colonial
level, the more refreshingly novel the play was, and the more he
enjoyed it.
Horace did not adopt all Harry’s new customs, for the sufficient reason
that Horry was a sickly fellow, unable to cope with Harry in braving
fatigue and exposure to the weather. But Horace not only found no fault
with his chosen champion in his antics, the brother liked the changed
life, and was the better for it in body and mind, because Harry, while
he was still tasting its essence, and skimming its cream, enjoyed it
with the lad’s naturally huge omnivorous appetite for enjoyment, and
Harry’s enjoyment was always more or less infectious where his nearest
friend was concerned.
The infection spread to more than Horace when Harry came into Friarton
Town, in the fancy dress which he had taken into his head to wear,
whistling or singing aloud in his fine baritone, though the song was
of no higher musical or intellectual calibre than ‘The Two Obadiahs,’
with sheer lightness of heart and gleefulness of spirit, the very
pessimists, in the habit of finding the foundations of the world out
of joint, and holding life to be stale, flat, and unprofitable, were
won to smile, as well as to sigh. Harry Stanhope was such a goodly
spectacle in the flush of his youth and strength and exuberant spirits,
if one could but forget that there came a term to these magnificent
animal gifts, and a just reckoning for the days of their triumph.
After all, the recollection only lent a wistful charm to all that was
fleeting in Harry’s glory.
It was not merely those who were closest to his own class—the
Wrights, Fremantles, and the vicar’s family—who delighted in Harry
and conspired to spoil him as the finest young fellow in the world,
perfectly charming, so delightfully natural, frank and unpretending,
so imperturbably good-natured in accommodating himself to the
difference in his position—though, to be sure, he could not forfeit
his birthright. It was not merely Fan Constable who beamed on Harry
as on a gay and gallant deliverer from the social depths into which
Oliver’s extraordinary recantation had consigned them afresh. At the
same time, Fan alone saw meeting in Harry, in the strangest, most
fascinating manner, both the confirmation and the contradiction of all
her early predilections and aspirations, until, in mingled conviction
and reaction, she was ready to honour gentle breeding more than ever;
while she became in a way reconciled to Oliver’s flight, which appeared
to coincide with Harry Stanhope’s course. She began to feel dubious
whether Oliver were so entirely wrong as she had supposed, whether
he were not following, without guessing it, a veritably noble and
knightly impulse in his raid against modern trade dragons, and his
search for the San Graal in the homeliest quarters. That dim undefined
notion, whether true or false, did much to restore Fan’s equanimity
and cheerfulness. What did it matter if the Wrights and Fremantles,
who were so frightened for hazarding their own debatable footing,
turned their backs, when Harry Stanhope lent the Constables the far
greater weight of his support, and constantly directed upon them his
laughing face, coming to Friarton Mill ten times oftener and on twenty
times more friendly terms, than Oliver with his contradictory spirit
authorised?
Yet Oliver too, in spite of himself, liked the lad for the very
qualities which were the furthest removed from Oliver’s own—the
boyish thoughtlessness, sanguineness and absence of any sense of
responsibility, the half-kindly and wholly confiding selfishness which
impressed on Harry the rooted belief that the whole world revolved,
somehow, round him and Horry, and was in a manner made for their
gain or loss; the half-audacious goodwill which made Harry claim,
so unhesitatingly and in such a large measure, the goodwill of his
fellows. Harry was as free from self-consciousness as he was mercurial,
and the summer sun warmed him through and through, without his being
ever troubled with a shiver of repulsion, or a groan of obligation,
in the view of wrongdoing and retribution on every side. Oliver was
tempted to admire as well as to despise, to covet while he condemned,
Harry’s monstrous exulting egotism.
After the first shock of his sister Fan’s inconsistent secession to
Harry Stanhope’s side of the question, Oliver looked on, without
surprise, if a little sardonically, and witnessed Harry’s unbounded
success in Friarton.
For the very Dadds and Polleys, who cherished a deadly distrust to one
of themselves that had penetrated to a higher sphere and professed
to return to his own, fraternised in a manner with the intruder,
called him ‘the right kidney,’ a pleasant young gentleman as ever
lived, taking his frolic as he was free to do. Bless you, he could not
really let himself down, be he ever so willing. His people and his
class would see to that. It was only his way of making fun. He was
a gentleman-farmer, like the lord-lieutenant, or as the late Prince
Consort had been, though he amused himself with aping the old yeomen.
And he had no fad of raising up the middle-class, any more than he had
of leaping over the moon. He gave himself no airs of superior wisdom
and virtue. It was only that he could make himself happy anywhere, and
had an agreeable word to say to everybody; while nobody was such a
donkey as to mistake Mr. Stanhope’s manner or presume upon it.
Old Dadd laughed loudly at Harry’s pranks, recalling old members of
the gentlefolks he had known who drove coaches and made walking tours
in sorry disguises for bets. He entertained Harry himself with these
reminiscences, to which the lad listened with his usual affability, old
Dadd standing hat in hand the while and Harry forgetting to bid the
draper cover his head in the mock yeoman’s presence.
Jack Dadd was enchanted when Harry not only enrolled himself a member
of the cricket club, but presided over its entertainments in the
‘Admiral Keppel’ afterwards. Here was an adherent worth having, an
authority as ready as he was great, from his unimpeachable advantages,
on sport and horseflesh. It was rather in pure enthusiastic homage to
his gifts and attainments, than in lurking sycophancy, that, though
Harry was fain to render himself hail-fellow-well-met to his new
associates, Jack began by deferring to him unfeignedly, and headed
the other members in cheerfully acknowledging Harry’s born supremacy.
The would be man of the people accepted the unsolicited tribute as a
matter of course, and not at all as if he disliked it. On the contrary,
he showed a very fair capacity for playing the cock of the roost in
addition to his other performances.
And only Oliver Constable groaned over these indications of what would
be the sort of alliance formed between Harry Stanhope and his adopted
class; how the members of widely severed sets in society brought
together through self-interest and for self-indulgence, would play into
each other’s weaknesses, and simply work out their mutual lapse and
loss.
Strict disciplinarian as Mrs. Polley was, she did not object to her
girls giggling at Harry Stanhope’s exuberant chaff, and exultingly
accepting bets of gloves and ribands with him, in which the Miss
Polleys were always the winners. Mrs. Polley did not exactly understand
that Harry Stanhope, who at his present stage was incapable of being
anything else than boyishly friendly and merry with all women, had
chaffed in precisely the same manner the barmaids of his earlier
acquaintance. Mrs. Polley herself smiled broadly on Harry’s jokes, and
called him ‘a good sort,’ a perfect gentleman, none of your stuck-up
pretenders—unquestionably Harry was not a _stuck-up_ pretender.
The one dissentient voice in Friarton was that of Catherine Hilliard.
When her cousin Louisa took the brothers under her wing, as if Harry
needed the protection, and doted on the youngest, she would have had
Catherine dote on him also. Mrs. Hilliard was too good-naturedly
selfish, too hilariously cynical, too well occupied on her own account,
to be a regular match-maker, supposing there had been scope for
anything save sick match-making in Friarton and the neighbourhood.
But she would not have objected, from the first hour she spent in the
company of the would-be yeoman, to making up a match between Harry
Stanhope and Catherine. Mrs. Hilliard would have lost her cousin as
a constant companion, but she would have found a jovial ally to her
heart’s content in Harry. And if the attractive young man’s worldly
wisdom was not his strong point, that was Catherine’s look-out, not
Mrs. Hilliard’s. He would form the most hospitable and genial of
kinsmen and neighbours, if he might not have all the qualifications for
a safe husband. On the other hand, the contrast between Catherine and
him was all that could be wished. It would do Catherine a world of good
to have her bookishness—detestable in a woman—her untenable notions,
her chillness and asperity, routed out of her by a gay-tempered,
easy-minded husband, whose easy-mindedness might not preclude the
wholesome discipline of any amount of obtuseness and stubbornness, when
interference with his masculine prerogatives was in question.
But unfortunately, Catherine could not see the beauty of the contrast
between herself and Harry Stanhope, as establishing an incontestable
point of union where the two were concerned. ‘He is no better than
an overgrown boy,’ she said, with a half-weary scorn. ‘He has not a
thought or care beyond his pleasure.’
‘My dear, that is what is so particularly nice about the boy,’
remonstrated Louisa Hilliard. ‘You and many other people are weighed
down with care, and the consciousness of care, to no purpose. What we
specially want at this epoch in human history, is a robust faculty of
enjoyment.’
‘I think I prefer the poor deaf fellow,’ said Catherine, in her spirit
of contradiction. ‘He loses his identity in that of his brother.’
‘Is that such a boon to the world, to lose one’s self and live in one’s
neighbour’s life?’ asked Mrs. Hilliard, shaking her head in merry
incredulity. ‘I am not sure that it might not prove easier and more
comfortable, on the whole, to be another than to be myself. I should
feel so deliciously neutral, you may be sure—nothing could touch me
very nearly. Your toothache would tingle quite bearably, suffered by
reflection through my nerves.’
‘I don’t think it is quite so with Mr. Horace Stanhope,’ said Catherine
coldly. ‘I don’t suppose you understand, Louisa.’
‘Not I, farther than that it is not in _you_ to go with the multitude,
either for good or evil. Child, I am certain it is for good, and to our
credit, when the rest of us heartily admire and like a fine, manly,
friendly fellow like young Stanhope, and I should have thought—though
I am not super-subtle in my intuitions—that you would have valued him
for standing by the poor creature his brother; whom, with what I must
call a morbid taste, you set yourself to prefer to the fairy prince in
his own person.’
‘What!’ exclaimed Catherine, ‘value a man for caring for the dog which
is fonder of him than of anything else in the world?’
‘Well, there is a proverbial estimate of “a dog’s life,” while there
are many good sorts of men that kick their dogs occasionally, when they
need chastisement,’ speculated Louisa, maliciously treading on one of
Catherine’s hobbies.
‘Yes; and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals exists
for the punishment of men’s brutality,’ said Catherine, with her pale
cheeks flushing.
‘My love, the Society has to do with ruffians—let us trust they are
comparatively rare. You are speaking like a girl who has been brought
up by maiden hands, who expects a man to behave like another girl
such as herself, not to say like an angel. She does not take into
account his different nature and rearing, together with his greater
temptations; she shrieks hysterically, and calls his least faults by
preposterously exaggerated names. Men who have nothing to do with her
either laugh at her, or fall into ecstasies over her baby innocence.
But woe betide her and her husband—should she consent to take such
a necessary appendage—if she will not open her eyes, and submit to
know a little more of the world. You must accept an older woman’s
word for it, Catherine, that a man may kick his dog when the animal
is troublesome; he may even swear a little at his wife, under great
provocation, and yet neither be absolutely barbarous nor profane.’
‘There may be something in what you say with regard to the wife’—began
Catherine, in perfect sincerity, but was stopped by the laughter of
Mrs. Hilliard.
‘For shame, Catherine, to prefer a dog to a man—or rather to a woman.
Never mind, there is another respectable old saw to draw inferences
from, in this case: “Love me, love my dog.” No doubt you are paying
Harry Stanhope the most delicate of compliments in your favour for
Horace.’
Catherine disdained to reply to the insinuation.
But though Catherine declined to add to the number of Harry Stanhope’s
worshippers, she appeared, like the other women, to be drawn into his
court where he stood the centre, next to Mrs. Hilliard herself, of the
bright stirring drawing-room at the Meadows. Catherine’s imagination
tempted her to speculate, with however little hope, on the diversities
and vagaries of human character. A new type arrested her, as an unknown
specimen stops and holds fast the naturalist. Harry was strange to her
in the sparkle of his bold thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness and
pure and simple egotism. The qualities were all naturally repugnant
to her, still they attracted her curiosity for a time, as qualities
which she had never met before, and might never meet again, in the
same degree or combination. Catherine, too, looked and listened as
if carried away with the charm when Harry, nothing loth, figured as
the hero of the hour, recounted his youthful exploits by flood and
field, volunteered, without a grain of shyness or scruple as to the
acceptableness of his service, to be at the beck of any and every woman
present—for Harry was no languid, supercilious, fine gentleman. He was
a gallant cavalier to the heart’s core. He only asked to be allowed
to help every woman, while he helped himself liberally to the first
place in her regard. But he was the reverse of the odious cowardly
personage—we may trust he figures more largely in fiction than in real
life—the lady-killer, professed or unprofessed. All was open and above
board with Harry; and upon the whole his attentions were too impartial
to have much individuality or to be invested with special danger. It
seemed as if he consented to be heard or seen for the entire sex’s
benefit, as he span his yarns—not particularly original, wise or
witty, but with an indescribable charm in them, due to their fresh
lightheartedness—of his school and college frolics: his prowess at
‘hare and hounds;’ how he was a bogie to his dame; his surreptitious
introduction of ‘Pin Him’ into his quad; the row he had been in when
town fought gown; the wrinkle he had been able to give such an awfully
clever fellow as Tyler in making up for the private theatricals at
the Wests—whose place was near Harry’s cousins. Then he sang his
songs whenever they were wanted; songs less aggressively warlike and
sportsmanlike than the songs of Jack Dadd and the other peaceful
counter-jumpers—sometimes love songs, or songs expressing passionate
memories, and tender yearnings, with fiery depths, and pathetic echoes
which Harry Stanhope had never fathomed, but which yet thrilled the
listeners as the words and airs were given by the full flexible young
voice.
It looked as if Harry were carrying all before him, and winning each
heart—including that of dreamy, dissatisfied Catherine Hilliard.
Oliver Constable judged so, as he lounged and contorted himself
unnoticed in the background, and said it was the way of the world and
that young beggar’s luck, of which he was not worthy, which he could
not be expected to prize at its proper value.
Two people knew better. Catherine Hilliard could not be called one of
the two, for she never took the question into consideration. It would
have felt too preposterous to her to enquire beforehand, what her
feelings might or might not become, for any hero of flesh and blood.
Besides, Harry Stanhope was not a man to her, only a boy, a big, merry
boy, who formed a momentary study for the thoughtful woman.
Mrs. Hilliard, while she was perfectly conscious of the latent
antagonism between Catherine and Harry Stanhope, still threw
them somewhat ostentatiously together, making Catherine play the
accompaniments to his songs, and causing him—which was a little of a
trial to Harry’s good temper, to be always on the side of Catherine—an
incorrigible bungler, almost as bad as Oliver himself—in the lawn
games in which Harry Stanhope and Fan Constable were adepts, a pleasure
for game lovers to look upon. Mrs. Hilliard elected Harry to take
down Catherine to the improvised suppers which were apt to follow
the improvised parties at the Meadows. Mrs. Hilliard could manage
these manœuvres with so much ease that it robbed them of half their
attractiveness to the manœuvrer, she was wont to complain privately,
since Catherine was as blind as a baby to any premeditation in such
arrangements, and was only more or less bored by the consequences. All
the same, it was her, Louisa Hilliard’s, duty to do what she could as
a hostess in the judicious assortment of her guests, and to show her
cousinly regard by doing what she could also to prevent Catherine’s
missing, by anything save her own folly, the chance of what would never
be a great and yet might prove a suitable establishment, in days when
girls, far more attractive to the generality of men than Catherine was,
could not pick and choose in making a match.
If the hostess baffled and plagued any rival pretender—say Fan
Constable—to a lion’s share of Harry Stanhope’s universal attentions,
so much the better for Mrs. Hilliard’s entertainment, and if it were so
much the worse for the rival pretender, whose fault was it save her own?
Harry Stanhope was not so egregiously foolish in his vanity as to fail
to penetrate the fashion in which Catherine Hilliard was taking stock
of him, weighing him in the balance, and finding him hugely wanting.
‘Look here, Horry,’ he protested, thrusting his fingers through
his fair hair in comical discomfiture, after an hour’s compulsory
companionship with Catherine, ‘that girl has been looking at me through
a microscope, and picking holes in my credit all the evening; she knows
not only how I was ploughed in my smalls, but all about that time I was
rusticated for the beastly row at Walsh’s, though I never told her a
word of the mess. I say, I wish the old woman’ (an irreverent reference
to Mrs. Hilliard, to which the lady would not have objected in the
least) ‘would not persist in pairing us off together. It is no go;
though no doubt Miss Hilliard’s tin might be of use in the farm, she
would not have a gift of me, and unfortunately I could not get the tin
without offering my precious self in exchange.’
‘Ain’t she more the style we’ve been accustomed to—I mean among our
people—than Miss Constable, for instance?’ enquired Horry, doubtfully,
of his oracle. ‘I think Miss Hilliard is rather a fine girl; looks like
a lady without making a fuss about it.’
‘True, oh king! She is stately in her stiffness as a stage duchess. And
she is a sap as well as a swell. I bet you she reads as hard as old
Herculaneum, not that she ever alluded to a book to me, except to one
of Lever’s stories, which she just mentioned tentatively, with great
scrutinising eyes fixed upon me, the better to assure herself that it
was something in my line. But I have glimpses of the old beggars the
English poets, and so forth, if not of the Greek and Latin humbugs,
in the turn of her neck and the wave of her hair; I am in constant
horror lest she should so far forget herself as put me through my exams
again—which line in “Paradise Lost” I prefer, or whether I agree with
Bacon that gunpowder ought to have been invented before lucifers. I
don’t think I can stand it much longer if Mrs. Hilliard will go on
acting as if we were made for each other, though I am prepared to own
that Miss Hilliard is innocent of any pretence in the matter. How could
it be otherwise when she is so stunningly wise and learned, and the
rest of it? Oh! I say, when you see all that, and the knowledge don’t
crush you, suppose you go in for the lady and the tin, to be ploughed
and harrowed into the dirty acres of Copley Grange Farm, and so relieve
your brother-officer of the obligation, Horatio?’
Horry laughed the discordant laugh of the deaf, and mumbled a
disclaimer of the honour and the implied preference on the part of
Catherine, while Harry went on speaking out his thoughts to his
second self with yet greater zest. ‘Now, Miss Constable believes in
me—fact, I assure you. That plucky, go-ahead little woman is, not to
say swindled, by me, for to do myself the justice, I never sought to
take her in; but she gives me credit liberally for a thousand manly
virtues I don’t possess. She half tempts me to believe in them myself,’
protested Harry, with an excited laugh. ‘It is not like you, old
fellow, who have rowed in the same boat with me ever since we two came
into this blessed world, and have naturally grown rather blind to my
weaknesses and besotted about me altogether. She who never saw me till
this season, with all her cleverness, and she is uncommonly clever,
which is better by a long chalk than being bookish—not that she is not
an educated woman also—does more than take me on trust. She endows me
with all the energy and endurance which are hers, not mine. She speaks
as if I were going, single-handed, to bring in the waste places of the
earth, and found a family. Confound it, Horry, it’s rather nice, and
generally improving to be believed in like that by a handsome, good
woman, as true as steel, I’ll wager my head, and as proud as Lucifer
in her own way, while she is ’cute enough in anything else to see
through a millstone,’ finished Harry, complacently stroking his beard,
as if he were beginning to suspect that he was really a finer fellow
than he himself, or any other person, save the faithful follower by his
side, had given him credit for.
CHAPTER XIII.
OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS CLASS.
Oliver nourished the forlorn hope that he might do something with the
girls of his rank in raising their aspirations and refining their
habits. They at least belonged to the gentler sex, and ought to be by
constitution more tractable and altogether of finer clay. He took to
dropping in of an evening at the Polleys, where the male element in the
back parlour was but feebly represented by superseded Mr. Polley.
Oliver turned with disdain from Fan’s despairing warning: ‘Oliver,
if you don’t take care, Mrs. Polley will think you are proposing to
“keep company” with one of her girls, and if you don’t fulfil her
expectations, she will set you down unhesitatingly and proclaim you
openly to be “a flirty, shillyshallying fellow, who don’t know your own
mind.” Are you such a greenhorn that you require to be told you cannot
look twice at a girl of this stamp, or exchange three sentences with
her, without the girl, or her parents for her, concluding that you mean
something in the matrimonial line, and going on to class you as her
admirer and suitor, and to calculate what sort of match you will make
for her? As you are, undoubtedly, a great match in the Polleys’ eyes,
you ought to behave with common prudence.’
‘No, no!’ denied Oliver vehemently, blushing hotly with chivalrous
pain. ‘You are aspersing your whole sex, Fan, in the persons of
tradesmen’s daughters; and if there were any ground for the aspersion,
it would be high time that it should be done away with, by the
introduction of wider, simpler, more friendly intercourse between young
men and women.’
‘Perhaps you really mean to ally yourself with the family,’ said Fan in
her vexation, falling into the offence which was unusual with her, of
employing almost as tall language as ’Liza Polley might have adopted on
a similar occasion. ‘To be perfectly consistent, you ought. All I ask
is that you will tell me in time.’
‘That you may carry off your goods and chattels before they are
contaminated by coming in contact with Miss ’Liza’s or Miss ’Mily’s
bridal finery, and renounce me as a brother before you are forced to
own her as a sister,’ said Oliver, beginning to laugh. ‘All right. But
I don’t own to the soft impeachment yet, though, if ever my time should
come, why not a Miss Polley—I beg her pardon for the liberty taken
with her name, but I did not begin the impertinence—why not a Miss
Polley, I say, as well as another?’
Oliver spoke with light defiance but with some bitterness underlying
his challenge, for his thoughts had gone back to an encounter that
morning, when Catherine Hilliard, driving with her cousin, had passed
him and his baker’s shop, literally with unseeing eyes. She had looked
more delicate and tired out than ever. No wonder, when she was being
not merely morally starved, but slowly poisoned in her Palace of Art,
her fantastic ideal world.
Oliver was too manly, with a higher manliness than Jack Dadd’s or
than that of many persons of far greater pretensions than Jack,
to experience the particular dread of misconception which Fan had
sought to instil into her brother. He was shy enough in his way, and
he fought tough battles with his shyness every day he lived, but
his self-consciousness did not take this form. He had revolted at
it every time he met it, not only when young Dadd boasted of girls
making dead sets at him, and showing themselves, poor little souls,
spoony on his account, but when fellows, who might have known better,
expressed their alarm for the lasting consequences of the temporary
associations of Commemoration Week, or talked of running the gauntlet
of the dowagers and damsels of the London season. Oliver had felt
still more aggrieved when he found the same gratuitous insinuations in
books of ‘unexceptionable tone,’ where men—bachelors and widowers,
of mature years and sane minds, masters of the situation in every
other respect—were represented as timidly putting themselves under
the wings of female relations that the heads of the houses might be
protected from the wary advances or bold attacks of the single women
in their neighbourhood who cherished designs on their freedom. Well,
no doubt, there were women of all kinds, like men; but was it honest
women, modest women, women with souls, women like the men’s mothers,
sisters, future and past wives, whom brother-men thus insulted, while
sister-women handed on the insult?
Oliver’s company certainly induced the Polley girls to forego, for
the evenings on which he called, their wanderings abroad in search of
gossip and amusement, which their mother tolerated because young folks
must have their day, and the girls had their markets (matrimonial) to
make, being bound, in a measure, to keep on the outlook for settlements
in life.
But the young Polleys’ gaddings were restrained within certain
well-defined and not to be subverted bounds of time and circumstance.
The Miss Polleys, collectively or singly, might frequent their
neighbours’ houses or such promenades as Friarton afforded, till three
quarters past nine, but they must be safe at home, if not at supper,
at the latest by ten o’clock, when the house-door was formally locked
by Mrs. Polley in person. No Miss Polley was at liberty to stray into
companionship not approved of by her mother, not even ’Mily—‘the most
owdacious of the set,’ as Mrs. Polley was sometimes moved to term her
favourite daughter, in referring to ’Mily’s flights of wild spirits and
self-will—dared to transgress in these respects.
Oliver took it as no particular compliment to him that the Miss Polleys
should be induced to stay at home when he was a visitor. Common
hospitality—of which their class was by no means deficient, required
it of all or some of them. And it seemed to the young man that any
variety must be welcome in the atmosphere—the intellectual stagnation
of which was equal to its literal oppressiveness—laden as it was with
the odours, from the shop, of cheese, sugar, and coffee.
Mrs. Polley—the presiding genius—when she was to be seen in private
life, for she was sometimes detained at the close of a busy day in the
shop, suffered from the fatigue consequent on the day’s labours, and
although she was always equal to an exertion, and roused herself to
brandish and snap her fingers figuratively and in a friendly—well-nigh
a playful fashion in Oliver’s face, he felt convinced when he or any
other stranger was not there, must give herself up to cross-tiredness,
to nagging her daughters, and snubbing her husband between fits of the
gapes over her knitting, or coarse hemming, and rough and ready darning
of household linen.
Mr. Polley, who was not regarded as company worth counting, by his
own children any more than by the rest of the world, did no more than
contribute the dreariest platitudes and the stalest incidents from his
second day’s newspaper, to the feast of reason and the flow of soul.
There grew to be a merit in the girls’ persistent giggles and in the
light-hearted empty chatter and idle gossip, pointed by personalities
and spiced by scandal, with which they stirred the heaviness, and the
absence of all dignity and beauty, from which Oliver was not astonished
that they made their escape, when they had the opportunity.
The Polleys had another sitting-room besides that behind the shop, a
best parlour or drawing-room as the girls liked to call it, in which
they sometimes sat with their hands crossed in their laps, or engaged
in fancy-work, entertaining company. But as Oliver chose to come to
them in the character of a family friend, a distinction which they
appreciated, Mrs. Polley overruled her daughters’ objections and
elected that he should be received in the ordinary family room.
‘He shall see us as we are,’ said the matron when the Polleys were all
together in the back parlour one evening before supper. ‘He sha’n’t
have to say we were honey to his face and molasses behind his back.
Besides, we don’t do nothing we are ashamed of. I tell you what,
gals, if he has got any one of you in his eye already, he’s that kind
of chap, if I’m not mistaken, he’ll think a deal more of you, and be
more likely to grow sweet on you, if he finds you with me and father,
in your house-gowns, working at your needles in the parlour here, than
if he were supposed to catch you sitting like dressed-up dolls, at
your fine-lady nonsense of crochet and bead-work, in the other room,
as, I dare say—for I have not been out at the mill-house for years
now—I’m a stay-at-home, even if Fan Constable were readier with her
invitations—his sister sits from morning till night.’
‘It’s all you know, mother,’ said ’Mily, a well-grown buxom girl of
eighteen; ‘but at least it shows you have not made yourself cheap at
Friarton Mill. Fan sees callers in her bare cold hole of a drawing-room
certainly; but when I go there, which is precious seldom as I know she
would rather have my room than my company, she is always pretending to
be notable over a heap of such common hemming and back-stitching as
even you can do. Fancy! she was making bed curtains, and not keeping
them out of the way either, the last time I was there. She is as busy
as any sewing girl over the vicarage old women’s flannel petticoats and
children’s cotton frocks. Rather she than I slave for such cattle. We
give a good subscription to Mr. Holland’s poor-box, and that’s enough,
I should think. But Fan curries favour with the vicarage people, who
have taken her up, though Peter Constable was an old chapel-goer like
we are, and Oliver goes to chapel still. I am at a loss to tell what
gentility she has more than us, except that she’s that proud and
stuck-up,’ and ’Mily sat up in her chair with Fan’s most frigid air,
amidst the loud applause of her sisters.
‘Now mind what you’re about, ’Mily,’ her mother reproved the actress;
‘you may not be far wrong, and you’re smart at taking people
off—there’s no denying it, but you may do it once too often. What
would Oliver Constable think if he saw you? He may not have any
nonsense about him, but he won’t care to have his sister turned into a
laughing-stock.’
‘I’m sure I don’t mind a fiddle-stick what he cares,’ protested ’Mily,
taking high ground.
‘Hold your tongue, and don’t speak again to me, Miss,’ insisted Mrs.
Polley. ‘You get too much of your head as it is; but you sha’n’t spoil
your chances by your folly before my very eyes.’
‘It ain’t likely to be me, mother,’ cried ’Mily, rather enjoying the
implication. ‘It will be ’Liza if it’s to be any of us. She is fitter
to tackle him with her rubbish of poetry, which ought to suit a college
man.’
‘Me!’ ejaculated ’Liza, a delicate, rather indolent girl, in injured
innocence. ‘I never spoke about poetry to Oliver Constable.’
‘And I should just like to hear you try it,’ Mrs. Polley gave her
literary daughter fair warning; ‘though a song is all very well at a
proper time and place, at a party or after supper. I was a good singer
myself in my day—you need not make faces, ’Mily—and I can raise the
tune yet in chapel a deal truer than a pack of set-up madams with
money wasted on them in an instrument and in piany-forty lessons.’ The
last cut bore reference to the superannuated piano in the Polleys’
drawing-room, and the two quarters’ fees for instruction in playing on
it, vouchsafed by Mrs. Polley to her daughters, being what they might
claim as their due in education according to the growing requirements
of their station. ‘But to sing my Maker’s praises is one thing,’ went
on Mrs. Polley severely, ‘or even to be able to manage a song or two
in addition to a hymn, and to have any traffic with play or poetry
books is another. To my mind, they’re worse than novels and romances,
and you all know what your deacons think of them. You gals may read
them on the sly sometimes, but it had need to be on the sly, for if I
get my hands on such devil’s books, into the fire or out of the window
they go. Them’s my opinions, and if you think to defy them you know the
consequences.’
‘Compose yourself, my dear,’ ventured Mr. Polley, looking up from his
newspaper. ‘I apprehend you’re going just a little too far. I remember
the old minister gave in to recommend Uncle Tom’s——’
‘Uncle Tom’s cat!’ interrupted Mrs. Polley, disrespectfully. ‘A good
turn of honest work is a far better employment than snivelling over
any made up story—though it were Mr. Holland or the old minister
himself as made it up. You can tell him I said so, if you like. I
wonder anybody can be so silly—not to say so unprincipled, for I
call it downright want of principle, to be taken in by printed lies.
Reading trash of stories and verses never paid a debt, or filled a
hungry stomach, that I ever heard tell of. But I’ll tell you what
they’ve done,’ speaking triumphantly in vindication of her theory,
‘they’ve brought an idiot like Poet Dymott,’ alluding to a local poet
of humble vocation, ‘as low as the union. Luckily his silly of a wife
who encouraged him died early, and they had no children to suffer
from his not sticking to his last and shoe-leather. Fools’ tales sent
a light-headed gipsy like Mrs. Dadd’s last servant into the county
asylum, after she was pulled out of Buller’s Brook, where she might
have stopped still for all the washing her character had got. We should
be a deal better off for maids-of-all-work, when we’ve the misfortune
to need ’em, if it were not for the trumpery “Family Heralds” and
“People’s Journals” as the girls have the impudence to take out,
throwing away their pence, and sitting up at nights by the help of
prigged candle-hends, at the risk of setting houses on fire, and
creeping and dawdling about their work next day. I don’t hold against
a book as is an improving book, and deals with our latter hends,’ Mrs.
Polley granted, showing herself a little more liberal and capable of
making a concession, ‘at a proper time, on a Sunday evening, when it
rains cats and dogs, so as to make chapel out of the question, and
there’s nothing else to do at home. But I’d like to see any of you gals
settle to a volume of sermons, if there was a glistening chimneypot
hat or a draggled tail of a skirt to watch passing the door. I don’t
make any stand against Polley muddling for ever amongst his newspapers,
since he’s no good at any better job.’
‘Missus Polley!’ objected the gentleman, looking up again from his
newspaper, with his hat still on his head. Though he rarely stirred
beyond the parlour, he wore his hat, except when he was at meals or in
bed, as if to give him the help of a few inches added to his masculine
height. He spoke half under his breath in subdued displeasure.
‘I don’t deny I like myself to know what’s a-going on, when I’ve time
to listen, which ain’t often, and Polley’s reading out saves me the
trouble of looking over the news,’ confessed the matron candidly,
taking not the smallest notice of her husband’s appeal unless by
speaking, if anything, in a louder key. ‘Besides, it helps to keep him
out of harm’s way.’
‘Missus Polley!’ groaned the defaulter more clamorously.
‘What are you Missus Polleying me for?’ his helpmeet turned on him
briskly. ‘You ain’t going to deny the tricks you played me when first
we went together, Polley? It is as well to keep you out of temptation,
though I should just like to see you trying on that trade again, now
that I’ve got the upper hand, and you’ve got some notion of the value
of a good wife, as has kept a roof over your and the gals’ heads, and
a full table, and the shop flourishing more than it ever did in your
day. You ought to bless your stars, Polley, that you ever set eyes on
my face, or that I consented to have a bad bargain in you.’
’Mily Polley was a little tired of hearing the chronicle of her
father’s delinquencies and her mother’s virtues; she broke in upon the
monologue, reminding her mother of an instance of inconsistency in her
conduct. ‘I wonder, mother, you ever let poetry books lie in the house
or suffer ’Liza to look into them.’
‘You know as well as I do, ’Mily,’ Mrs. Polley explained, shortly,
‘that ’Liza has not been so strong as the rest of you gals, and when
she has not been able to sit up with her colds and influenzas, there
was no great wrong done in her diverting herself with a book, though I
could have wished it had been of a more sensible and serious kind. I
did try to set Mr. Holland upon her about that.’
‘I was dumpish enough, I can tell you, without reading mouldy sermons,’
grumbled ’Liza. ‘I wonder how any of you would have liked to be
condemned either to do that or count your fingers, for my strength was
that gone I was not able so much as to hold a crochet-hook, and Mr.
Holland said there was no harm in my pieces, some of them were most
elegant.’
‘Then ’Liza’s books,’ said Ann Polley, who was commonplace and
practical to excess, ‘are not ’Liza’s any more than ours, only that she
looks into them sometimes. They are school prizes and Christmas gifts,
and keepsakes from friends, though I think they might hit on better
presents. It would be a great pity if you were so far left to yourself
as to burn them, mother, since some of them are quite handsome “table
books,” which I should be sorry to handle except to dust, for fear of
spoiling their red and green and gold backs. They are a great ornament
laid round the drawing-room table.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Polley, decidedly, ‘that is the right place for them.
They will turn nobody’s feather head, and waste nobody’s time save in
the dusting, lying there.’
CHAPTER XIV.
THE FIRST ATTEMPT.
After all, if Oliver had always been ushered into the drawing-room
which these closed books were supposed to embellish, he would not have
found many traces of higher aspirations in its gaudy carpet, and chairs
and tables of one ponderous monotonous style, since Mrs. Polley’s
influence had at least saved them from being slim and gimcrack, with
its samples of meretricious fancy-work, in which there was as little
fancy as there was use, than he could discover in the back parlour.
The family room was furnished with the darkest drugget and coarsest
mahogany and hair cloth. It did not, according to the Polleys’ ideas,
admit of any attempt at ornament. It was reserved to fulfil their
notions of ease and comfort, the table being often covered and littered
with the materials employed in the girls’ home dressmaking, and the
chimney-piece given over to Mr. Polley’s tobacco-pouch and pipes, and
Mrs. Polley’s thimble and reels of cotton.
’Mily Polley was not a bad mimic in that lowest development of art
which is contented to grasp and caricature such salient details and
absurdities of human nature as come within the artist’s limited
observation. And though there was a horrible absence of reverence
and tenderness in the girl’s rendering of some old woman’s palsied
utterance, or some half-imbecile boy’s stutter, in her cool giving
of her own father’s stock phrases, even in her close copies of Mr.
Holland—the Polleys’ clergyman’s—stiff or strained gestures in the
most solemn part of his services, the representation was the only
version of the drama which ever reached the Polleys, while it was as
good as a play in forcing Mrs. Polley to relax into a grim smile and
to forget for a moment her rare achievements, and in stimulating Mr.
Polley to clap his hands magnanimously at the mocking echo of himself.
There was no theatre in Friarton, and if there had been, the Polleys
belonged to a branch of the Christian Church which condemns theatres
without reservation, nay, sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Polley,
extends the condemnation to play-books as well as players.
Yet it struck Oliver Constable that the Polleys were at the level of
civilisation when the theatre, if not abused and tabooed, would have
naturally come in as an effective instrument in their training. He
arrived at the conclusion as he formed one of the audience to the
mimicry which ’Mily Polley, who was proud of her gift, was sometimes
tempted to practise before her friends and acquaintances, in addition
to her family; as he took notice of the nicknames which abounded in her
vocabulary in about an equal degree to that in which they flourished
in Jack Dadd’s speech; and as Oliver observed the glee with which the
girl utilised any exceptionally silly or stupid person who had the
misfortune to enter her circle, making him or her serve for a temporary
butt. The last was grievously disloyal, and the worst thing was that
nobody—neither the mistress nor the master of the house, not even
’Liza, who was certainly gentler than the others, who sometimes read a
little from choice, and who was therefore under the impression that she
had culture—recognised the disloyalty.
But the mimicry was an intellectual effort a shade in advance of
the bald individual experiences, the tittle-tattle purely peddling,
or more or less mischievous, which constituted the staple of the
Polleys’ conversation, and was just such an effort as the theatre
might have spurred on and supplemented. Oliver imagined the Polleys
might have liked to go to a respectable theatre which was not under an
ecclesiastical ban, might have enjoyed a broad farce, and relished and
profited so far by one of the homelier order of tragedies.
What he could not imagine was, that till they had gone a little farther
in elementary knowledge, and without the theatre, which comes in to
meet the intellectual law that perception and imitation are among the
first acts of the mental powers of a child, or an undeveloped man or
woman, any of the Polleys, with the exception of ’Liza, could derive
the smallest benefit or satisfaction from the mass of books, which, to
be sure, they left untouched. He ceased also to be surprised that the
Polley family should be in the section of Mr. Holland’s congregation,
the members of which composed themselves, after the prayers and hymns,
to look round on their neighbours and manifestly take stock of their
presence, looks and clothes, or who openly nodded and audibly snored
throughout their clergyman’s finest peroration, with which, however,
they would not have consented to dispense, since they took a reflected
pride in his fervid eloquence as contrasted with the vicar’s well-bred
conversation in the pulpit. Oliver had ceased to get impatient with
what he had been accustomed to consider Holland’s violent transitions
in a variety of bad styles—from the strongly sensational to the
familiarly anecdotal—bordering on the facetious, when the critic
was better able to estimate the order of intelligence with which, to
a large extent, the preacher had to deal. Oliver began to pity the
poor teacher, who was bound alike by his calling and his conscience
to impart the highest truths which could be addressed to humanity, to
these dense minds and stolid hearts.
Oliver found the girls by fits and starts furiously busy, or, in spite
of their mother, absolutely idle. It was clear that notwithstanding,
or because of, their mental vacuity, they luxuriated in idleness a
little after the fashion of the dwellers in Eastern zenanas. The
Polleys still regarded idleness much as their poor young drudge of a
maid-of-all-work, taken from the workhouse school, looked upon it, with
more reason, as one of the great gains of having risen and prospered
in business and the world. To do nothing save gabble idle gossip was
next best to wearing fine clothes every day of the week and every hour
of the day, and eating at every meal early lamb and salmon, pastry,
plum-cake, and strawberry ices, which the Polleys’ class are now in
circumstances to add to their more primitive dainties of pork-pies,
muffins, and shrimps. Idleness was one of the established privileges
of ladies to which the girls gave full credit, and of which they were
not slow to avail themselves when they had the opportunity. It might
pall in time, and so might the fine clothes and fine food in unlimited
quantities, but such satiety the Polley girls were not likely to attain
so long as they lived under their mother’s rule. And they prized their
advantages the more because they were still reduced to snatch at and
make the most of them when these only came in their way occasionally,
by the arbitrary will of Mrs. Polley.
Oliver observed that the girls had none of the sustained industry of
Fan, and that they were constantly seeking to shirk the share of work
in the shop and house which their mother laid upon them. ’Mily was
particularly adroit in slipping off her burdens, and her active mother
made more allowance for ’Mily’s adroitness than for ’Liza’s laziness
or Ann’s slowness, showing that she considered rebellion incidental
to youth, and admired in this case the cleverness with which it was
carried out. Mrs. Polley said her youngest was ‘a sad pickle,’ but
she admitted she had been thoughtless and fond of her pleasure beyond
everything in her own girlhood. She daresayed a house and family on
’Mily’s refractory shoulders would steady her in time. She would rather
have a girl smart for her own ends than a silly or a dawdle, any day;
so far from regarding the smartness thus exercised as dishonourable to
the culprit, Mrs. Polley saw in it a proof that ’Mily would be worth
something in the end.
The household needlework, which is still done at home in houses like
the Polleys’, was another task which the girls evaded, or discharged,
with a grudge, in the most slovenly fashion. Such disgraceful
needlework, to be worn in private, as the Polleys passed through their
clumsy, careless fingers, Fan Constable would not have accepted from
the least scholar in the vicar’s wife’s school.
It puzzled Oliver that Mrs. Polley, who insisted so strongly on the
merits of energy and enterprise in her own case, could, as a matter
of principle, permit the comparatively useless, frivolous lives her
daughters led. But when he sounded her one day on whether she did
not approve of training girls to self-help, as fit successors to
their fathers and mothers in such a shop as she herself conducted
successfully, he found, strange as it seemed to him, that she too, was
tinged with the girls’ views of gentility. Oliver, who had thought to
have pleased his father’s old friend by the suggestion, had never gone
so near to sending her off in a huff—and Mrs. Polley in a huff was a
formidable person to have to do with.
‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with a dry
cough, ‘my gals don’t ought to look forward to going into the shop. I
haven’t toiled my shoulders and my ’ead, and stood there till I was fit
to drop on market-days, for my gals to have to follow in my shoes.
If business goes with us as it has done, I’m ’appy to say, ever since
I took it in hand, I expect I shall put enough by to enable the gals,
if they ain’t provided with husbands in the meantime, to live on their
means, and do nothing, like the best in the place.’
Oliver was silenced.
The one employment which entirely overcame the Polleys’ taste for
idleness, and on which they entered with a will and the utmost
zest, was what Oliver reckoned their unfortunate blunder in making
objects of themselves in the line of dress. They could always be
eagerly interested in frilling themselves from top to toe, in pulling
down their old flounces, and furbelows, and bunches of skirts, and
reconstructing them, if possible, in an uglier shape than before. They
were never wearied of manufacturing the most grotesque apologies for
hats and bonnets. Oliver thought, in contrast, of Fan and Catherine
Hilliard’s simple gowns and quiet hats, which, if he had known it,
’Mily Polley classed as the dowdiest things out, and farther stated
that it was her deliberate opinion, only a learned young lady with
her head in the clouds, like Miss Hilliard, or a girl with the cool
assurance of Fan Constable, would take it upon her to be so plain in
her dress, and would not at least try to be wearing what was stylish.
Oliver, poor benighted man, only marvelled, on the contrary, how even
girls in their vagaries could accomplish such tremendous mistakes in
what one might have imagined would have been the congenial art of
adorning their own bodies.
Nobody could call the Polleys’ lives gloomy or austere, yet to Oliver
their enjoyments appeared grievously ignoble, even when they were not
of an animal character. He was very sorry for those girls, whom no man
had hired to worthy work and wages. He thought of the innumerable
missions to the poor, and of the ladies who, to their unending credit,
devoted much time and attention to raising the women of the lower
ranks. He recalled the superior advantages which may be held at least
to balance the increased temptations of the upper classes. And he
reflected, with deep regret and shame, how Fan withdrew, and Catherine
Hilliard recoiled, from all association with girls like the Polleys.
What chance had they of escaping from irredeemable materialism and
innate vulgarity—those deadly foes to all that is spiritual and
really noble? What help was extended to them beyond the Sunday sermon
which flew over their heads, and the verses in the Bible—which they
read as a lesson, that had little or nothing to do with their past or
present, but belonged, as Mrs. Polley would have said, to their ‘latter
hends’—to rise above gross self-indulgence—so long as it was not what
the world called vicious? For the Polleys were not merely respectable,
but even inclined to be Pharisees in their loud boasting of their
respectability. Yet self-indulgence, which was not absolutely vicious,
was in their eyes perfectly admissible and actually laudable. A man or
a woman who would not gratify himself or herself by well-nigh wallowing
in the outward fruits of success, was either a screw or a minx. Heroes
and saints had very little that was heroic and saintly in them to the
Polleys’ mind. All were dragged down to the same low level.
The Polleys’ standard was very little above that of the most
rudimentary Christians, whether in high places, in courts and alleys,
or in the bush and the jungle. The Polleys would do no murder, would
not pick or steal—unless in those adaptations and adulterations of
groceries, which had become part of a wide-spread system, with which
all trades complied, and which nobody, save a fanatic, dreamt of
defining as stealing, would prove chaste maids and matrons, would
not literally fall down and worship golden images, and for anything
farther would regularly attend chapel—of which the heads of the house
were members, and would contribute liberally and with great _esprit de
corps_ to the minister’s salary.
It did not strike Oliver that the Polleys were much exposed to the
temptation to break those commandments which they respected, and for
the rest, with regard to the grand spiritual lives beyond, these were
simply ignored and uncomprehended. Oliver feared there was a more
impassable miserable chasm between the Polleys’ mode of existence and
all that belongs to a higher life, than even the ghastly gulf which
cuts off the outcast in his crimes and wretchedness from purity and
peace, just as it was said of old that the publicans and harlots
were nearer the kingdom of heaven than their extremely respectable,
outwardly moral, nay, ostentatiously religious brethren. To do the
Polleys justice, they made no great barren profession of religion; they
contented themselves with being by inheritance and social politics
chapel people, and despising the members of a state and priest-ridden
church.
Oliver, in his arguments with Fan, had given all honour to the
essential virtues of his class; now it pained him intensely to be
forced to recognise wherein it fell short, even in precedent and
tradition, not to say in word and deed, of the standards and practices
of the more highly cultured and better educated classes.
Certainly truth was not confined to any rank, and flagrant deception
was confessedly committed by ladies and gentlemen. But these ladies and
gentlemen were not respectable members of their class and, unless in
outrageous instances, counted falsehood brought home to them worldly
dishonour, and concealed their lapses from truth with all their might.
But a certain amount of lying did not involve the same disgrace when
it came to light in Oliver’s class. Jack Dadd was singularly obtuse in
perceiving that the twists and turns which he gave to his words and
actions, in order to serve himself, and of which he actually boasted to
Oliver, in the sense of what some Americans would call ‘smart practice’
or as capital jokes, were neither more nor less than cunningly veiled
lies. As for the Polley girls, they indulged with the utmost freedom
in wild exaggerations, horribly prejudiced statements, and barefaced
fibbing when it suited their purpose, until Oliver hung his head and
almost groaned aloud.
Of course, as Oliver was thankful to think, there were many much better
representatives of the small shopkeeping class than any he encountered
in Friarton—young men whose public spirit and intelligence, if not
their culture, far exceeded his own; girls as dutiful as Fan had been
to her father, and with a still higher and truer idea of what made
perfect womanliness, and of a necessity perfect ladyhood, in any rank.
But he feared these formed the exceptions, more or less rare, to the
ordinary rule. They were the salt of the earth, no doubt, but bore no
greater proportion to the social body they preserved from corruption,
than salt to the physical world with which it is incorporated. Oliver
was compelled to suspect that the Dadds and Polleys presented an
average specimen of their class.
Oliver sought to prove a friend and brother to the young Polleys and
their girl companions as well as to Jack Dadd and his associates. In
order to be so he struggled to show himself patient and judicious with
the girls. He answered all their questions about his former college
experience and present volunteer movement, as fully as he knew how.
And then he tried to carry the inquisitors to something in earth or
heaven beyond their small personalities and their life in Friarton,
with so poor a result that he fell back in despair to asking ’Liza
Polley about the poetry—of which she was said to be fond. She did not
impress him as the most intelligent of the sisters, but he fancied if
she had the shadow of a taste for poetry, he had a hold upon her.
Oliver was in blissful ignorance of Mrs. Polley’s objection to such a
subject of conversation, as not merely trifling in the extreme, but
verging on impropriety.
For that matter, Mrs. Polley was not quite so good as her word where
a well-to-do young fellow, who might be looking after one or other of
her daughters, was concerned. She gave Oliver considerable license
in his attempts to entertain the girls, leaving him to ‘get thick’
with them in his own way, refraining, to a remarkable extent and
with some disinterestedness, from her usual custom of engrossing the
conversation. She only dropped one little hint which, notwithstanding
Fan’s warning, Oliver failed to appropriate. ‘If you encourage ’Liza
in her liking for such nonsense, you must be prepared to take the
responsibility upon yourself, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with
something like a simper which might have been alarming in so downright,
plain-spoken a woman, had it been addressed to a less single-hearted,
self-forgetful man.
But Oliver undertook the responsibility with a frankness and
fearlessness which were their own defence. He assured Mrs. Polley that
Miss ’Liza need take no harm from the perusal of good poetry, and
pledged himself that, so far from causing her to neglect any duty, it
ought rather to spur her on and brace her to its better performance. He
smiled to himself after the utterance of so great a platitude, while
the hint evaporated in empty air.
It was poor Miss ’Liza who felt embarrassed. She had been accustomed to
hear herself accused of literary tastes with an admixture of very mild
vanity and rather more energetic deprecation. She was by no means sure
that the tastes were sufficiently pronounced to stand the investigation
of a university man. She fidgeted and hesitated, and caused ’Mily to
mock her more than ever, when Oliver broached the word poetry to her.
In addition, by common consent, in the light of compatibility of taste,
’Liza found Oliver Constable likely to be set aside by her family and
friends as her ‘beau.’ He was in all probability coming after one of
the sisters in his regular visits to the back parlour, and ’Liza was
the one who struck her own set, at the first glance, as cut out for him.
’Liza was quite the girl to believe what everybody told her. And she
was not without a sense of obligation to the world in general and to
her sisters in particular, for handing over Oliver to her. She was
struck by the disinterestedness of Ann and ’Mily, and she was flattered
with the notion of a distinguished conquest on her own part.
On the other hand, ’Liza Polley was not so simple as to suppose that
her sisters were actuated entirely by generosity in their early
withdrawal from any rivalry in her pretensions to Oliver Constable.
Indeed, in spite of her literary bent, ’Liza was ready to agree with
’Mily in her sweeping assertion that Oliver was ‘a handsome gorilla
of a duffer,’ who was always talking sense, or nonsense which was no
better than sense, since it was past their comprehension, and who was
constantly on the verge of lecturing them. ’Liza did not relish the
imminent prospect of a lecture, however delicately administered, any
more than ’Mily or Ann relished it. She had an uneasy consciousness
that Oliver would consider her a humbug, since she had really hardly
any more topics to talk over with him than her sisters could find.
Above all, ’Liza knew in her inmost heart there were persons—young
men—a young man whom, whoever the world might regard as well matched
with her, she liked infinitely better than she could ever like Oliver
Constable.
Oliver was a great scholar, and she was not nearly scholarly enough
to be at home with him as she was with that other person, who chaffed
her unmercifully about being a blue-stocking, but who, she was sure,
nevertheless, looked up to her a little for her slender bookish
attainments.
’Liza dreaded that ‘the word of’ Oliver would separate her from this
more favoured aspirant to her regard.
On all these counts ’Liza was so reluctant and retiring when Oliver
tried to ‘tackle’ her, as he called the process, on her reading, that
he felt—even in being foiled anew—at least he could triumphantly
refute Fan’s unwomanly assertion that the Polley girls would be eager
and unmaidenly in receiving and misinterpreting his advances.
Oliver never got beyond the discovery that ’Liza’s theory of poetry
was decidedly that of rhyme; and she inclined strongly to what was
meretriciously sentimental, especially when the sentiment was that of
pairs of lovers meeting by sunset or moonlight, under oak trees, or in
bowers of roses, or amidst ruins in churchyards. These persons swore
eternal fidelity and incontinently died by violent deaths, or one of
them proved false, as it were for the purpose of breaking the heart
of the other, who continued, to Oliver’s mind, wrongheadedly faithful
to a creature who was not worth a moment’s regret. When ’Liza strayed
slightly from these stock scenes, it was into the superficial splendour
of palaces, or at least into the height of hackneyed picturesqueness
as displayed in the castles and fortified towns, the crusades, sieges
and battlefields of mediæval times. Followers at a humble distance of
Moore, L.E.L., and Mrs. Hemans, constituted her antiquated school of
poets.
It saddened Oliver to see that ’Liza’s faint poetic fancy could find
no resting-place nearer home, and remained on that account utterly
divorced from her daily life. It was like a wistful groping for better
things far a field. It reminded him of the manlier sort of songs with
which Jack Dadd and his comrades diversified their ‘If ever I cease to
love’ and ‘Not for Joe.’ How the shop lads, who had not the remotest
chance of being active participators in the open-air stir and joy of
a hunting field, or who were in no danger of knowing any voyage more
exciting than a holiday trip in a river steamer, would give the full
force of their young lungs and hearts to the vigorous refrain of ‘John
Peel’ or ‘The Bay of Biscay—O.’
CHAPTER XV.
THE ANNUAL EXCURSION.
Every year the shop people of Friarton showed themselves so united and
independent as to have an excursion and picnic of their own, on one of
their summer holidays.
It was something quite different from the day with their employers,
which is such a popular piece of patronage on the part of large
firms. The _employés_ had nothing to do with this, they had their
own day apart. It was the employers themselves, with their wives and
families, who met and agreed to disport themselves together. It was
as if—supposing the example could be followed on a large scale—all
the linendrapers and all the Italian warehousemen in London arranged to
assemble with their households at some spot, as much more distant and
more select than Epping Forest and Brighton as the masters’ claims to
potentiality and dignity are beyond those of their young men and women.
Oliver Constable was prompt in supporting the usual celebration of
the day, and in proposing to make one of the company in either of the
two omnibuses engaged to carry the pleasure-seekers to their place of
entertainment. He discovered to his chagrin that the party consisted
chiefly of young people. An American fashion was setting in, which
caused Mr. and Mrs. Dadd, and Mrs. Polley, with their contemporaries,
not to refuse their countenance altogether, but to withdraw to a
considerable extent their presence from the gala. They found the annual
excursion, on the whole, a little trying to people of mature years,
and they were not impelled to make the sacrifice on their children’s
account, since these worthy fathers and mothers were persuaded that
their young people were perfectly able to take care of themselves at a
picnic, and that to have their seniors looking on proved a restraint on
the enjoyment of the juniors. Let the elderly people have their outing
also, but let it be distinct and apart from that of the young people,
whose limbs, wind, and hilarity were naturally so much more rampant.
But Oliver made so great a stand against this innovation on the part of
his fellow-townsmen, and so set his heart on the fathers and mothers
accompanying their sons and daughters, that though old Dadd and Mrs.
Polley did not know what to think of the young fellow’s urgency, they
yielded, and even pressed Mr. Holland, the minister of four-fifths
of the shopkeepers of Friarton, into the service, to accompany the
excursionists and say grace at the picnic.
It was much more difficult to convince Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley that
the revival of the presence of the elders was an advantage.
‘The guv’nor and his missus will only be in the way, and spoil sport;
and what do we want with a feller in a white choker out of chapel?
In fact, we have two of ’em; for Constable, though he means to be
friendly, is a bit of a stick—all the worse, sometimes, that he don’t
show his colours in his coat or his tie, or his hat,’ Jack grumbled and
blustered; while ’Mily complained there would be no fun, and threatened
not to go, but soon withdrew her threat.
For the first time in a number of summers, Fan Constable announced
her intention of being one of the pleasure party. It was a solemn
concession to sisterly duty. Oliver was such a fool (with a folly akin
to that of Henry, Earl of Morland, and not altogether removed from
the madness of the Apostle Paul, when he became all things to all
men,) that she could not trust him to spend a whole day in the fields
with those riotous lads, and, above all, those bouncing or languishing
girls, without the protection of her eye upon him and them.
Ungrateful Oliver had some words with Fan on her going in the spirit in
which she went. ‘If you can’t make yourself agreeable, Fan, and do as
others do, but must stand aloof with what they call fine-lady airs, you
had better stay away,’ said Oliver, with a man’s brutal frankness.
‘I hope my manners will pass muster,’ retorted Fan loftily. ‘As to
doing what others do, perhaps you will not object to my forming an
exception, if the company begin to pelt each other with gooseberries,
or to play at kiss in the ring.’
There might have been another recruit, or couple of recruits, added to
the forces, if Oliver had not rejected the suggestion peremptorily.
Harry Stanhope was beginning to find that yeoman work was not so
entirely a manly pastime—like hunting and shooting—that it did not
require all the play he could obtain to diversify it and prevent
it from sinking into dull drudgery. He was not particular in his
associates, but showed himself ready to knock up acquaintances in any
class, and have a jolly lark with them at any time.
‘Won’t you take me with you to the turn-out?’ Harry put it
insinuatingly to Fan. ‘You may fancy I should be in the way, but if
they will let me drive one of the shandrydans, I’ll pledge myself
you sha’n’t be spilt. Constable knows I’m good to handle the ribbons
without an accident. It’s a thundering shame of Constable not to speak
to my merits and Horry’s in this and in other respects, to leave us
out in the cold, and go and enjoy himself like a selfish beast. I’m
convinced it ain’t your blame, Miss Constable, that we have not got a
bit of paste-board, or whatever is necessary.’
It was not Fan’s blame, for when Oliver said ‘No, a hundred times,
no,’ doggedly, and with nothing save a stern satisfaction in the
consideration that he was robbing Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley of the
delight of such an acquisition, Fan remonstrated with him privately.
‘Why can’t Mr. Stanhope go if we go, Oliver?’ she asked.
‘Good heavens, Fan! can’t you see the difference?’ demanded Oliver, out
of all patience with the suggestion. ‘What business has Harry Stanhope
with the Friarton tradespeople? Do you think he would go among them as
his equals? He would go as he would intrude on a brewers’ bean-feast,
or a bargemen’s saturnalia, or a meeting of thieves, or a pilgrimage to
Mecca, without doubt or compunction, to see what he could see, and to
take his fun out of the proceedings, while some of the idiots engaged
in them might imagine he was there in good faith, as one of themselves.
Am I to be an accomplice in such treachery?’ Oliver’s broad shoulders
went up to his ears, as he imagined Stanhope letting Jack Dadd suppose
he was pumping him, or drawing ’Mily Polley out, and astounding her
ignorant audacity.
‘It is a relief to hear that there are idiots who cannot be mistaken
for gentlemen and ladies,’ was Fan’s parting shot. After all, she was
not sorry that Harry Stanhope would not be present when she resumed her
place in her father’s circle.
It will occur to every experienced person that the planning and
carrying out of a large picnic, where the details are not confided to
a public purveyor, or left to qualified servants, must be a little
troublesome. But the amount of business in hurrying to and fro,
consulting, fussing and wrangling, which the annual excursion caused
in Friarton, among businesspeople, too, who ought to have known how to
supply the provisions required with the greatest despatch and the least
difficulty, offered a curious speculation to Oliver. He found it the
simplest matter in the world, by a single reference to Jim Hull, and
to former estimates of contributions to the entertainment, to order
and send to the managing committee the quota of pies, tarts, and what
Jim generalised as ‘flummery,’ with which Constable’s bakehouse had
always furnished the excursionists. Why could not all the entrusted
butchers, fishmongers, and grocers do the same? He must conclude that
they, or their wives and daughters for them, took pleasure in first
creating, and then overcoming, obstacles and objections, though Mrs.
Polley asserted she was ‘that wore out’ with all she had undergone in
conducting the preparations and putting down the senseless proposals
of some people, that she would a deal rather have three market-days on
end.
The young women did not give much help, though they ran backwards and
forwards incessantly between the houses of the chief managers, for
three days preceding the excursion. The girls’ principal interest was
absorbed by their costumes for the occasion. As they had imparted
every detail to each other long before, and as they saw each other
every day—both in slovenly deshabilles and what might be called smart
toilettes—Oliver stupidly failed to see how the dresses could be of
much consequence to anybody.
What attention the young people had to spare was bestowed more on
the style of the feast, and the good things which were to figure at
it, than on the locality of the picnic. Oliver imagined this lack
of concern in what was, in a measure, the object of the ten miles’
drive—the visit to a well-known ‘hanger,’ or high wooded bank, which
sloped down to Buller’s Brook—might arise from the circumstance that
the same bourn had formed the termination of the expedition ever since
he could remember. The place was pretty and suitable enough, but there
were other places, a little nearer, or a little farther off—an old
deserted mansion, with a park open on certain conditions to the public;
an ancient church, a treasure to archæologists; a bend of the Brook,
famous for water-lilies; while variety was charming. He ventured to
name a different halting-place, and was put down for a reason which
proved unanswerable to his audience, and which he could not set aside.
There was a rarely used barn near Finchhanger, and the owner placed it
at the disposal of the company in case of rain. In a climate like ours,
such a retreat with its possibilities of indoor games and dancing—even
to no better music than impromptu whistling and singing—to while away
the lagging hours, was what no wise man could ask his neighbours to
despise. And the probability of seeking refuge in the barn was rather
in the ascendancy this year; not because the skies were more inclined
to weep than usual, but because Jack Dadd had struck out the brilliant
improvement of taking down a detachment of the volunteer band on the
top of his omnibus, and, as everybody knew, dancing on the grass was
better in theory than practice.
Oliver ended by being sceptical whether a change of place, even if
he could have answered for the weather, would have gained his end or
proved acceptable to anybody save himself perhaps. That was after
he had spoken on the rival merits of the old park and church before
’Mily Polley. ‘Oh! bother the place!’ cried ’Mily frankly; ‘who cares
for the place? One is as good as another, and then there is the barn.
I rather hope the rain will only stop off till we’ve got there, and
after that come down in a pelt this year, so as to send us all in
where we can eat comfortable, without old Bales’ (to wit the senior Mr.
Dadd, with his rotund figure and his linendrapery business) ‘keeping
us waiting till he has poked about and hunted out the least damp spot
for his lumbago, and mother has made a fright of herself by tying her
pocket-handkerchief round her throat to guard against a crick in the
neck. And have you heard of young Scissors being so sharp as to secure
ever so many of your band with their instruments, in case we should
have nothing else to do but take a hop? I’m sure I don’t know that we
could do anything better. Oh, I say, Mr. Oliver, I’ll tell you what is
of a great deal more consequence than a park when we ain’t proposing to
pick cowslips, or a church when none of us means to get married just
at present. Will you see—a word at headquarters mayn’t be amiss—that
Jim Hull of yours lets us have oyster and lobster patties this year
instead of cherry pies? “I’m so partial,” as ’Liza says, I would give
my ears for oyster patties. And oh! fancy Jack Dadd has got his father
to fork out two bottles of sherry and two of champagne—the real, not
the gooseberry thing, instead of the lemonade, which was all we used to
have. I don’t care for sherry, but “I adore champagne,” that’s ’Liza
again. I should like to swig it like beer—that’s me. But sha’n’t we
have a guzzle?’
’Mily called a spade a spade. Oliver was reminded of a market-day when
he had seen a stout country lass gazing longingly into the window of
the shop which Jim Hull had caused to be filled with tarts and cakes
for the occasion. The rustic damsel had great difficulty in tearing
herself away from the contemplation; as she did so she exclaimed with
effusion to a companion, ‘I could eat the whole window full.’
Oliver sought to make atonement for his recoil from ’Mily’s speech, by
honestly weighing the comparative demerits of what might be classed as
gluttony and gourmandism. It was the fashion for some ‘great swells,’
as ’Mily would have called them, not only to indulge in the last, but
to boast of the practice, and hold it up to admiration as an elegant
accomplishment—an essential element of high civilisation. ‘Plain
living and high thinking’ were exploded with them also.
‘If you will allow me,’ said Oliver meekly, ‘I’ll mix claret cup for
you.’
‘Thank you for nothing.’ ’Mily rejected the proposal flippantly. ‘Nasty
flat trash. I’m for as much champagne as I can get for my share,
without mother interfering. There!’
Had ‘the girl of the period,’ with the fine fast tone which was found
to have such a rousing effect on the jaded languor and formal worldly
propriety of Mayfair, come down to dwell among the shopkeepers of
Friarton?
Oliver showed himself so far amenable to domestic and feminine
influence as to make the concession to Fan’s having vouchsafed her
company, and as it were pledged herself to civility, of taking his
place with her in the omnibus of her choice—that which did not contain
Jack Dadd and his detachment from the volunteer band. But even without
Jack and his musical performers—who took time by the forelock, and
were guilty of such enthusiasm in their duties as to seize their
instruments at the very moment of starting, and fill the air with a
truly military combination of fife and drum, serving as a summons to
the rest of the townspeople to contemplate the setting forth of the
shopkeepers on their great holiday—the other omnibus, filled with
a company of girls dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, with
rivulets of curls running in every direction; matrons with bonnets
which supported thickets of flowers among cascades of lace; and men in
their Sunday suits, was in itself so hilarious and so unconscious of
any just cause for moderating its hilarity, that the girls’ giggles
rose into screams of laughter, the matrons shouted through the din
to each other, and the men outshouted their womankind, until the one
vehicle was as noisy in a different way as the other.
‘Ain’t you a glum sort?’ a brother-volunteer said, in the freedom of
the moment, to Oliver.
‘No,’ Oliver denied, ‘but I don’t see why I should disturb my
neighbours with my pleasure.’
‘Oh! as to that,’ the other merrymaker turned off the implied censure,
‘though we ain’t workpeople, we don’t take our pleasures so often that
we should hold ourselves in when we do, lest we should disturb them as
has no business save pleasure.’
It was true enough, and it was also true that here was an instance
of Englishmen’s not taking their pleasure sadly. After all, it was a
mere ebullition of excitement at starting, so far as the seniors were
concerned. Very soon such members of the party as old Dadd and Mrs.
Polley subsided into sobriety, verging on drowsiness and tartness,
although their manners might not have the repose
Which stamps the class of Vere de Vere.
But it was in the very height of the outburst, when Fan looked as if
she could have crept beneath her seat to hide her diminished head, and
Oliver drew down on himself the accusation of being ‘a glum sort,’
that the omnibus rattled past the Meadows, and revealed near the
gate, through the vista of thick shrubs, Mrs. Hilliard throwing up
her plump white hands in comic protest at the glare and blare of the
cavalcade, with the share taken in it by her cousins—half a dozen
times removed. For of course as Louisa Hilliard knew everything, she
had been made aware beforehand that Fan and Oliver were to be there.
She was stationed at the best point to get a passing glimpse of them.
She meant them to see her also, and she indulged in that gesture with
the mischievous intention of conveying to the brother and sister her
pretended opinion that they two were at the bottom of all that blazing
colour and deafening noise.
Catherine Hilliard with her dogs stood just behind her cousin. She
had been lured to the spot without guessing what was to happen. She
was in the act of turning away with fretful impatience to avoid the
disagreeable shock of the spectacle. It was in violent antagonism to
the shadowy, stately world in which she lived, much as a group from
the crowded sands at Margate in the season is in opposition to a
trio from a Greek play. If she never interfered with the employments
and enjoyments of those human beings who had nothing in common with
her—save the same origin in the first, and, it was to be hoped, the
same interest in the second, Adam—why should they roughly intrude on
her notice, compelling her attention and summarily dissolving the
spell of memories and fancies which formed her refuge?
When Finchhanger was reached, there was no time wasted in walking
about, though the day, which had begun by being doubtful, was turning
out fine. The dinner was the great event of the day, and till it was
accomplished successfully—nay, triumphantly, it was not to be thought
that any of the picnic party could care for anything else. Oliver,
while he cast a regretful glance on the fleeting lights and shades on
wood and water which his companions were overlooking, admitted the
reasonableness of the principle when a picnic without servants was in
question. He was thankful at least for the absence of false assumption.
He laboured to fall in with the requirements of the moment. He put
himself in the experienced hands of Jack Dadd, with the intention
of acting under him in the capacity of an amateur waiter, in spite
of Oliver’s peculiar disqualifications for that onerous office,
and though he had the mortification to receive regularly, after the
discharge of every two out of three commissions entrusted to him, a
plain dismissal, though it was couched in tones of jovial mockery and
recalled the next moment. ‘Get along with you, Constable, you are only
in a man’s way. Was that the style in which you handled plates and
knives at your University spreads? You must have been a rare blessing
to the crockery shops. I’m blowed if I know how you escaped losing
half your cutlery, or carving your own hands and feet. You had better
attempt to carry them with your toes, or in your teeth at once. My good
feller, you ought to have stuck to your books. You ain’t fit for the
ordinary business of life.’
No fault could be found either with Fan’s qualifications or
behaviour—in so far as rendering every assistance with a fine capacity
and expertness which were in broad contrast to Oliver’s helpless,
hopeless _gaucheries_. If she had only not been so much in earnest in
her work!
‘Drat it!’ Jack Dadd broke out aside to ’Liza and ’Mily Polley,
who were languishing and romping over the tasks assigned them, not
showing a tithe of the power to become excellent table-maids which Fan
displayed. ‘I can’t stand Fan Constable, though she’ll have everything
put out in apple-pie order before we can say Jack Robinson. I wish she
would sit down. Ain’t she going about setting us an example how to mind
our businesses, as if we were all in shop or at Sunday-school? I’ll
throw a dish at her head before I’ve done,’—an extreme expression of
feeling which delighted his hearers immensely.
But as Fan was very much in earnest at all times, Oliver could hardly
complain of her conduct in this instance, and certainly he could not
call her aside and reproach her for devoting herself for the rest of
the day to a girl far more delicate than ’Liza Polley, who had come out
in her anxiety not to lose the excursion when she was quite unfit for
the fatigue.
Oliver had already made more than one private note to study at leisure
the amount of sickliness among the girls of his class in Friarton. He
was reluctant to ascribe any proportion of it worth mentioning to those
Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun illnesses which Mrs. Polley attributed
unhesitatingly to the sufferers having ‘tucked into’ stuffed goose and
plum pudding, ducklings and pancakes, the first pickled walnuts, sliced
cucumbers and greengage tarts, according to the season. ‘Girls—and
boys too for that matter—will take their treats without any thought of
the consequences,’ she said, referring to the mode in which dissenters
still emulate good church people in keeping those festivals which
their chapel ignores otherwise. But Oliver preferred to believe the
unsatisfactory bill of health was the result of a wilful and wonderful
ignorance of God’s laws of physical life in such elementary obligations
as have to do with fresh air, regular exercise, scrupulous cleanliness,
enough and suitable clothing, not too much food, together with a
sustaining interest and object in existence—even that subject to the
injunction to be temperate in all things.
The evil effects of these neglected and outraged laws must be
intensified in the case of girls, whose indolent and self-indulgent
practices alternating with spasmodic exertions in any occupation they
could not possibly avoid or really cared about, and in the pursuit of
such pleasure as came in their way, exposed them to grave harm, which
men, by their established tasks and better balanced habits, avoided.
The aimlessness, with a single signal reservation, of these girls’
lives tended also to mental vacuity and its train of disorders.
There was only one disadvantage from which the average tradesmen’s
daughters of Friarton were happily exempted: that was the unsatisfied
craving, the wearing away and eating into itself, of such a nature as
Catherine Hilliard’s, over-stimulated and cultivated to the utmost, but
finding no essentially human food for its support, or field for its
exercise.
Oliver could not blame Fan, though he could have wished her less grave
and absorbed in her philanthropy. At the same time he was sensible that
everybody, except Celia Reid, whom Fan was waiting upon, looked askance
at her present benevolence as at her previous diligence. ‘It ain’t
natural in a girl to come out for a day’s pleasure and shelve herself
at a moment’s notice, that she may nurse the first person as has a
headache or is sickified. She might have left that to one of the older
people. It is just like Fan Constable with her airs. We ain’t good
enough for her to enjoy herself with us, but she will play the Good
Samaritan for our benefit—set her up! Celia Reid is a mean-spirited
thing to give in and allow it. Could not she have stopped at home
rather than afford Miss Fan a back-door to get out of, that she might
not feel obliged to be free and pleasant like the other girls?’
Oliver clearly comprehended the judgment that was passed on Fan’s
sister-of-mercy performance; but he had no idea that he, with his eyes
open and a very different disposition towards the company, ran any risk
of being indicted for a similar offence.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MIDDLE AND END OF THE FEAST.
It was Oliver Constable’s misfortune that he could no more make a
speech, unless under high pressure, than he could dance a minuet; so
that when there was toast-giving chiefly to thank old Dadd, who sat at
the foot of the table-cloth, and the matron who presided at the head,
Oliver went through a halting, stuttering formula, at the expense
of a good deal of colloquial Saxon, common-sense, and mother wit,
thus failing again ignominiously—this time in the very help which
his companions considered they had a right to expect at his hand, or
rather mouth. A fluent speech, well garnished with Latin quotations
which nobody would have understood, might have lent an _éclat_ to this
part of the day’s programme, and carried off some of the tedium. If a
young man who had received Oliver’s education, could not deliver such
a speech, his friends had a right to be disappointed, aggrieved and
disgusted—especially as Oliver, by moving to secure the attendance of
the old fogies at the picnic, had brought down upon the more juvenile
members of the company the revival of an obsolete rite, which nobody
relished save old Dadd, who entertained the delusion that he was good
at a funny speech. The result of Oliver’s incompetency here, was as if
he had got his associates into a trap and left them in the lurch.
There Constable sat, after his disgraceful break-down, with his long
legs very much in their owner’s, as well as in everybody else’s way, as
mute as a fish. When Mr. Dadd succeeded in introducing, in a sentence
of his reply to the sorry compliment which had been paid to him, a
handsome reference to a pair of young friends as had not always been
present at their blow-outs—but better late than never—and he could
wish no happier thing to the young gentleman and lady than that they
might be speedily provided with partners both at home and abroad,
Oliver, carefully refraining from a glance at Fan and with all eyes
fixed on himself, was content to utter a curt ‘Thank you,’ while
he held up his glass before his reddened face so clumsily that he
occasioned a diversion by pouring half the wine down Mrs. Dadd’s silk
sleeve. She was so humble that she would not allow him to do what he
could to remedy the accident, but of course there was a stain just
above the elbow. Anyone with half an eye might see how much she was
annoyed, from the way in which her husband, who could read her looks,
interrupted his speech, by pulling out his handkerchief and offering
it to her to rub the spot, while he remarked in a half-audible aside
to his next neighbours that he and Jack would not hear the end of that
’ere stupid accident of Constable’s, till they forked out another silk
gown to mother, when by rights Constable the villain ought to pay the
piper.
Constable would willingly have paid the piper if he had known how to
do it, without implying patronage and offence. It was the last of his
thoughts to act as a kill-joy at the picnic. He strove with the usual
failure of such striving to be social. He could not make a speech
fit for the occasion, but to Fan’s disdain he was one of the first
to consent to sing in his fairly tuneful voice. He chose advisedly
the pretty old people’s-song, ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill.’ But his
choice of a song proved one of Oliver’s many failures with the best
intentions. If the lass were ever meant for such an audience, all its
younger members at least had grown away from her influence. They had
as little appreciation of her attractions as of her designation.
The ‘young ladies’ present would not have relished the word ‘lass’
applied to any of them, and would not have cared to be admired for such
hum-drum and homely qualities as those which had inspired the poet. The
greater portion of the listeners barely freed Oliver Constable from the
injurious suspicion of singing down to their standard, while they took
care to express a little supercilious surprise at his taste in songs,
and to talk of this particular specimen as ‘an old-fashioned thing’
with no ‘go’ in it. He would have done a great deal better if he had
made fools of them by offering them the old doggrel of the mad scholar,
which Jack Dadd had somehow picked up, and which he flung at Oliver
with a mocking ‘Look here, Constable, I’ll tip you a college stave.’
Amo, amas,
I love a lass,
And she’s both tall and slender:
In the nominative case, with a cowslip’s grace,
And she’s in the feminine gender.
That rant brought down a round of applause, while the gentle charm of
the ‘Lass of Richmond Hill’ fell flat.
There was a little of the freedom of manner which Fan had indicated at
the close of the meal, either because the serious business of the day
being well over, there was a reactionary tendency to frolicking, or for
the alarming reason that old Dadd’s champagne had proved exceptionally
heady and had taken extraordinary effect on heads not accustomed to the
potation.
’Mily Polley had kept the ‘merry thought’ of her wing of a fowl to
pull with Jack Dadd, and when she failed to secure the longer half of
the bone, she was so left to herself as to toss her share into Jack’s
waistcoat. Jack was still farther left to himself, though it was only
a rose which he plucked from his button-hole and aimed at her ducked
head. However, the precedent was ominous and the selection of missiles
might not have continued so judicious.
Fortunately Mr. Holland succeeded in establishing a humorous clerical
veto. ‘Come, come, you young people,’ he protested affably, ‘you must
not take to throwing about things. It ain’t safe. How do you know but
you might catch me in the eye? It would be a pretty job if I had to
appear with a black eye in your chapel pulpit on Sunday. I ain’t sure,
though all my deacons are here, that I should escape censure.’
‘Hang it,’ muttered the dissentient voice of Jack Dadd amidst the
clamorous approval of the joke, ‘what though we bunged up both his
eyes, if he means to sit upon us now. We ain’t priest-ridden Pussyites.’
In reality Jack cherished no evil feeling towards his pastor, only
the young fellow looked upon it as manly and swellish to express a
certain amount of defiance of clergymen and contempt for their order.
He liked to shock those of his fair companions who regarded sacerdotal
pretensions more respectfully, but who had no objections to being
shocked into crying out at such a culprit as Jack Dadd.
Oliver valiantly fought against pronouncing a judgment on the little
interlude, by comparing it in his own mind to what Horace Walpole has
described of a scrimmage he witnessed in a box at Vauxhall or Ranelagh
between the members of Lady Petersham’s party, after supper. Only a
hundred years ago such incidents occurred in public among the leaders
of the great world, and, at the worst, ’Mily Polley was a thousand
times less objectionable than the disreputable fine-lady, and Jack
Dadd than her drunken profligate squires. Oliver would certainly point
out to Fan the analogy between the scenes, emphasising the fact that a
certain Bohemian picturesqueness—and blackguardism belonging to the
first, were lacking in the second.
As the afternoon sun still shone, and only a light south-western
breeze tempered the heat gratefully, even the greatest devotees to
dancing and the barn among the company found themselves reluctantly
compelled to take advantage of the unwonted favour shown to them by
the weather, and to forego still their favourite resource. The party
was a picnic, ostensibly an out-of-doors party when the state of the
sky would permit, and there remained so much unvitiated simplicity and
matter-of-factness among its members as to deter them from behaviour
out of keeping with their professed purpose.
There might be considerable inconvenience in carrying it out, such as
was involved in the obligation of the presence of the volunteer band,
Mr. Dadd’s tendency to lumbago, Mrs. Polley’s fears of cricks in the
neck, and the common lively irrational horror of the whole insect world
with the exception of butterflies, another relic of the prejudices
of the company’s betters in the past; but since the clouds would not
collect—strange reluctance—or the fine weather break-down, these men
and women were prepared to go manfully and womanfully through their
parts, with a kind of heavy loyalty.
The seniors sauntered aimlessly here and there, sat uncomfortably on
the tree stumps, staring at nothing, and only waxed animated when
everyday interests came to the surface in their desultory conversation.
Oliver caught snatches of old Dadd’s harangue on the fall in calicos
and Mrs. Polley’s animadversion on the rise in lemons—together with
the complaints of all the men of the sauciness of apprentices, and of
all the women of the incompetency of maids-of-all-work, between stray
notes of robins, the rustle of falling leaves, and the trickle of
water. Oliver wished with all his heart that the undertones of nature
which her guests had come out to hear, had been more attended to,
and had risen loud enough to drown the clatter of trade. As it was,
he rather admired the elderly people’s politeness in veiling their
impatience for tea, the second gipsy meal of those who were so unlike
gipsies, and concealing the alacrity with which they should start on
the homeward drive.
The juniors played games and danced under difficulties on the uneven
ground, among the long grass, to the fife and drum band. Oliver could
not screw up his courage to the point of attempting such precarious
polking, while Fan continued engrossed with her opportune patient. But
Fan’s brother exerted himself to play for two in blind-man’s-buff,
till the players, tired of the sport, found more scope for amusement
in perpetrating audacious thefts on the articles of apparel their
companions had laid aside in order to join in the dance or the game
with comfort and spirit—the victims making frantic efforts to recover
their lost property.
Oliver could not be guilty of the liberty Jack Dadd took in possessing
himself of a girl’s hat and veil, sticking it on his own head and
proving what a vagabond-looking young woman he would have made, as
he rushed here and there, through the wood, pursued by the owner of
the hat. When another girl ventured to pull out a glove which had been
dangling from Oliver’s pocket, he suffered her to keep it, possibly
more to her surprise than her satisfaction. It was pure child’s play,
but Oliver had grown too old and modest in his civilisation to be
able for child’s play, at which both players and lookers on, to his
discomfiture, ‘laughed consumedly.’
Poor Oliver! his was an anxious and thankless office which he had
assumed at his own charges, and Fan’s earnestness, threatening to
become a family quality, infected him in its discharge. Harry Stanhope,
who was no reformer, would have impartially scattered merry-thoughts
and posies, purloined girls’ attire and pranked himself in it, when he
saw it was the humour of his neighbours, without a scruple and with
considerable diversion to himself in the process.
To cover his shy withdrawal Oliver was betrayed into committing his
cardinal mistake at the picnic. He stumbled unconsciously into what
all those present regarded as Fan’s track. There were two plain
retiring elderly women of the party whom the majority of its members
reckoned decidedly beneath their rank. But the Miss Barrs were
respectably connected, they had always been at the excursion, and they
were undoubtedly proprietresses of a green-grocer’s shop, not merely
grey-headed shop girls. Oliver was first attracted to them by their
comparative isolation in the crowd, and then by the circumstance that
one of the sisters was quietly searching for, and gathering, a nosegay
of such aromatic wild flowers as summer spares, not merely picking a
few at random and dropping them carelessly the next moment, while she
was far past the age of coquettishly disposing of the last stray rose,
or plume of the queen of the meadow, in the demure bonnet which she
wore instead of a smart hat.
Oliver was reminded of his baker who had the sneaking kindness for
butterflies. He actually introduced himself to Miss Nancy Barr, and it
compensated for a good deal which had jarred upon him in the course of
the day, when he made the agreeable discovery that Miss Nancy really
had considerable knowledge of wild flowers and a genuine regard for
them. She had once lived with an uncle who had been a schoolmaster
endowed with a love of nature and botany, she was tolerably well
acquainted not only with the general appearance and properties of
plants, but with old superstitions and lingering traditional virtues
attached to them. She was a fairly intelligent woman, especially on
this subject, which was akin to her walk in trade, and when Oliver made
use of the old poet’s words,
‘These flowers white and red
Such that men callen Daisies in our town,’
she brightened up and said she had heard her uncle read those lines. He
found she was further familiar with the flowers summoned to lament the
friend of John Milton who bade the ‘daffodillies’ fill their cups with
tears; and she could herself repeat part of the catalogue of herbs in
Shenstone’s Schoolmistress’s garden:—
The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,
Fresh balm and mary-gold of cheerful hue,
The lowly gill that never dares to climb.
Oliver was as much amazed and elated as if he had encountered one of
the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ so often referred to. In the innocence
of his heart he proceeded to cultivate the acquaintance of ‘a rational
human being,’ as he called her, rendering the process conspicuous by
sundry darts into the wood, and dives down to the brink of the Brook,
as his eye was caught by a specimen of winter-green or horehound which
he could procure for her. She was a plain elderly woman, quite old
enough to be his mother. She and her sister had appeared neglected at
the picnic, a circumstance which was in itself a patent reason for such
small atonement as lay in the power of Oliver or any other promoter of
the feast. But if he could only have realised it, the social reformer
had placed himself under a tyranny as great as any he could encounter
in this world. A glare of light like that on a throne was cast on all
he did. A score of eyes, which did not seem to be seeing him, were, in
fact, recording his every action and commenting on it, weighing him in
the balance and finding him wanting.
‘I do believe Constable is low-lifed,’ said ’Mily Polley to Jack Dadd,
borrowing Jack’s masculine use of the surname where his friend was
concerned; ‘or is he stuck-up, after all, like Fan? Is this to show us
he is condescending from the highest to the lowest, and it may as well
be the lowest to prove the depth of his condescension? Good gracious!
to think of his paying attention to an old frump like Turnips.’
‘It is a queer taste,’ said Jack lazily, while he lolled on the bank by
the lady’s side.
‘I can tell you,’ said ’Mily in confidence, ‘I don’t think it’s the
best of usage to our ’Liza, whom he’s letting walk about with only
Bella Willet, after he has given us some cause to think he was making
up to ’Liza.’
‘Serve ’Liza right for jumping at a newcomer because of his college
education, as has only made a donkey of him to begin with, and because
he has got hold of his father’s business and tin, which, as sure as
I live, he’ll make ducks and drakes of before he dies,’ said Jack
sardonically.
But after Jack had gloated a little longer on the edifying spectacle of
’Liza’s discomfiture in being reduced to the company of one of her own
sex, while she underwent the double humiliation of seeing ‘Turnips’
preferred to her, his good-nature led him to quit ’Mily, who was at no
loss to find a substitute for her attendant, and go to ’Liza, though
his sympathy took the doubtful form of teasing her with chaff about
her rival. Still, ’Liza had the comfort of being quits in the end with
Oliver, who remained profoundly ignorant of the whole by-play.
It was one of the established customs of the day at Finchhanger that
those girls—not tom-boys and pickles, or humbler cynics like ’Mily
Polley, who held the practice in strong contempt as strictly belonging
to idiots of shop girls and low lads of Sunday-school teachers—should
bring back rural trophies from the picnic, in fast-withering,
limply-dangling wreaths of oak leaves and ferns, obscuring and
imperilling the real gum flowers in the girls’ hats. Sometimes an
obliging young man consented to have his hat or cap—in the band of
which he would on other occasions rollickingly stick his pipe or
railway ticket—similarly decorated by willing if bungling fingers,
with such spoils as Ophelia gave her life for. And it was Oliver who,
at this picnic, under the severe eyes of Fan—supporting Celia Reid’s
head on her shoulder to prevent her patient from fainting away—weakly
submitted to ’Liza Polley, with recovered spirits, decking his miller’s
hat with briony. He was thinking of the summer roses round his
mill-house window, and of what he had counted his only opportunity of
being crowned like an ancient Greek. But Mrs. Polley began pursing up
her mouth, and even Polley looked knowing and important.
As for ’Mily, she asked Jack Dadd if it was to be his turn next, and
Jack answered with more plainness than politeness that he would not
make such an ass of himself.
‘Like Bottom the weaver,’ said Oliver, with reckless waste of simile.
‘Well, it is more in the way of rubbish of weavers than of any fellers
that I have been accustomed to keep company with,’ said Jack loftily,
giving Oliver a lesson in good manners. In spite of it, and of his
self-consciousness, Oliver wore the hat and its ill-arranged garniture
with an excellent assumption of composure on the return to Friarton.
CHAPTER XVII.
AGNETA STANHOPE.
Before the autumn had well begun, while the Stanhopes flattered
themselves they were like the other farmers in the heat of harvest
work, their only sister was permitted to come on a visit to them at
Copley Grange Farm, and she entered into the situation with girlish
relish equal to, though different from, Harry’s.
Agneta Stanhope’s seventeen years of life had been dull and monotonous,
and apart from the ordinary experiences of girlhood, though she had
suffered no outward privations during their progress. The childless
aunt who had volunteered to take the little girl in charge, had been
faithful according to Mrs. Stanhope’s light. She had taken care to
provide Agne—that her own expense certainly—with a good governess and
skilled masters. Mrs. Stanhope had been conscientious in making it a
point that the child should have every material comfort, and she and
her governess had shared all the advantages, which Mrs. Stanhope held
fit for them, that could be derived from General Stanhope’s position
and income. Agneta had always been duly recognised as the niece and
adopted daughter of the house, whether in town or country. She had even
found a little establishment formed for her own especial well-being at
the seaside, when other children were sent there. In short, Agneta had
been treated with perfect humanity and consideration, and could lay
no claim to being the persecuted, neglected orphan child of romance.
But the General and his wife were neither of them particularly fond of
children, though they did not call the grapes which had not been given
to them sour. Accepting with philosophic adaptability the lot which
they regarded as assigned to them, they replaced private by public
interests. The couple went much into society and travelled a great
deal. They were spirited, intelligent, liberal-minded in a conventional
way, decidedly popular, and overwhelmed with engagements.
To such a pair, though they fulfilled their obligations to Agneta in a
perfectly honourable well-bred manner, the child and girl was of small
account—at least till she was old enough to come out formally, go into
company with her guardians, and obtain the establishment which Mrs.
Stanhope felt bound to put in her way.
Indeed, Agneta had seen as little of her uncle and aunt as was
compatible with their relations. She had spent nearly the whole of
her short life in schoolrooms, within the confines of a park and a
few neighbouring lanes, or in the narrower bounds of West-end squares
and gardens—on marine parades, or occasionally for a change on the
promenades of foreign watering places. She had been largely consigned
to the companionship of an unexceptionable elderly governess, who had
become a martinet, with the most of any originality or spirit she
had ever possessed pressed out of her by the exigencies of a long
and toilsome professional career. It was little wonder that Miss
Dennison, though she was all that her certificates proclaimed her
and Mrs. Stanhope’s fancy painted her, as a well-born, well-bred,
well-principled woman, whose solid education had not been entirely
neglected, while her French accent was that of a native, and her music
and drawing those of an accomplished amateur, proved still not a
congenial companion for a girl whose heart was stirring and fluttering
with the ardent impulses of that spring-time, which when repressed into
a walk is all the readier the next moment to break out in a gallop.
Indeed Miss Dennison was chiefly concerned—so far as the duties of
her office would allow—with securing the ease and rest which she had
laboriously earned.
It happened also that there were few contemporary young people among
those branches of Agneta Stanhope’s father’s and mother’s families, the
heads of which troubled themselves, amidst the distractions of modern
life, to remember her existence and send her invitations to spend some
of her holidays in their circles.
Beyond her family connections, there was an embargo laid by Mrs.
Stanhope, and especially by Miss Dennison, in her increasing
scrupulousness and dislike to interruptions of her routine, on juvenile
friends for Agneta, beyond a very select few, until the girl grew up
with hardly a playfellow or intimate companion save her brothers, who
had only been with her at brief intervals, separated by long spaces of
time.
The visits of Harry and Horry at the General’s had been the bright
spots in Agneta’s life which had aroused the young humanity in her and
kept it from stagnation. To Harry especially she had owed the greatest
enjoyments in keeping with her years which she had ever known. Harry,
a manly little fellow from childhood, had always been rather fond
and proud of his younger sister, and had shown himself as careful of
her, and indulgent to her, as could be expected from his habitual
thoughtlessness, though he had never dreamt of ranking her with Horry
in his regard, or supposing that he owed to her the same allegiance. He
and Horry had never been sundered. Horry was in a measure necessary to
Harry, as Harry was to Horry, while Agneta had merely proved a pet and
play-thing now and then, and, after all, was but a girl, who belonged
by rights to Aunt Julia and the General—not to the lads.
Horace, in his infirmity with its attendant jealousy, had been tempted
to look upon Agneta as an interloper between him and his brother, and
it had only been Harry’s staunchness to both which had preserved the
fraternal bond intact in either case. Harry was the medium, not only of
communication—seeing that Horry peevishly complained he could never
hear his sister’s soft treble voice—but of such mild family affection
as subsisted between the other two.
Most girls in Agneta Stanhope’s class would find it difficult to
conceive that a fortnight’s stay with her brothers, in the rusticity of
their new estate, could be a treat of treats to Agneta, having all that
was wanting to render it ‘perfectly exquisite,’ in the extravagance of
her girlish speech, supplied by the misfortune of Miss Dennison’s being
attacked by influenza on the eve of their setting out, and so prevented
from accompanying her pupil. ‘Poor dear old Madam Punctilio, as Harry
wickedly nicknames her,’ reflected Agneta gleefully; ‘she would
undoubtedly have been in the way and spoiled so much. Since she is in
no danger and is not suffering particularly, while she misses nothing
by being detained in her comfortable quarters at Thornley Lodge and
escaping the worse than bachelors’ housekeeping at the Farm, it is not
cruel, is it? to be a little glad that she has become so opportunely
ill?’
Unfortunately Mrs. Stanhope had not anticipated the possibility of
the accident, when she consented, with considerable hesitation and
reluctance, to allow Agneta to go to her brothers for a couple of weeks.
But Mrs. Stanhope could not bring herself to separate entirely
the members of the same family, though Harry and Horace had been
disappointing in failing to develop any faculties their friends could
lay hold of, to push them on in the world, and in the stupid lads’
obstinately sticking to each other, so as to make matters worse, until
this miserable _dernier ressort_ of a farm had to be tolerated for
them, still the young men had not done anything which could warrant
their aunt in forbidding their sister to visit them. As an habitual
practice, of course, living with her brothers in their primitive
establishment, was not to be thought of for Agneta. Her prospects
must be considered in the first place; her time was not to be wasted.
But she had not yet come out, she had not gone far beyond the point
when childhood and girlhood meet. If ever the liberty were to be
permitted, here was the opportunity when she would incur the least
observation, and run the slightest risk. For Miss Dennison would still
be responsible, since it would be as her pupil, in her charge, that
Agneta should go to Copley Grange Farm. And very likely a single trial
of the life on which her brothers had resolved—a species of Robinson
Crusoe isolation—rather than any steep decline into a lower stratum
of society, in Mrs. Stanhope’s mind, would rob the girl of any farther
inclination to go to them.
When the expedition was about to start into the wilds, and Miss
Dennison broke down against all calculation, Mrs. Stanhope was heavily
hampered by the nature of her own engagements. It was an impossibility
for her to sacrifice herself and them, so far as to undertake to
chaperon Agneta and countenance Harry and Horace, even for the matter
of a couple of days, in their yeoman establishment, where she knew her
presence must create the greatest disturbance. She could not attempt
another compensating alteration in the programme. She did not see
herself warranted in anticipating Agneta’s entrance on the great world,
and her career, by carrying her niece with her for the gaieties of a
race week, to which Mrs. Stanhope and the General were pledged.
Mrs. Stanhope, in the hurry of the dilemma, seemed to see herself
compelled to send Agneta, to the girl’s unbounded delight, to Copley
Grange Farm, under no more qualified escort than that of a steady old
waiting-maid.
Mrs. Stanhope’s chief dependence was on the brothers’ having sufficient
_esprit de corps_, where their sister was concerned, to look after her
when she was with them. Then Agneta, in her own person, was not so
destitute of dawning discretion as to run straightway into mischief
for the short interval of time during which she was to be Harry and
Horace’s guest.
The very first use which Harry made of his guardianship was to carry
Agneta to Friarton Mill. ‘I have brought over my sister Aggie to you,
Miss Constable, that you may be a friend to her also,’ said Harry in
his winning way, which was not so much graciously affable as frankly
confiding in the friendliness of his kind.
Fan was more than proud and pleased, she was deeply gratified by the
trust, and grateful for it. It raised her in her own estimation, and
she was satisfied it would elevate her in that of others. If Harry
Stanhope chose to commit his young sister to the care of Fan—of all
people—during Agneta Stanhope’s stay at the Farm, it showed not only
his conviction of Fan’s claims to be a gentlewoman, it proved to Fan
that her own instincts of ladyhood had been correct and genuine.
As for Agneta, she went into still greater raptures over lovely old
Friarton Mill than over the quaint antiquated farmhouse. She privately
included Miss Constable, who had been so good to Agneta’s ‘boys,’ who
was such a nice, pretty, quiet-looking little woman in her mourning,
in her enthusiastic admiration. Miss Constable was quick to guess
her—Agneta’s—wishes, and was evidently going to be very kind to
her. With regard to the big, awkward, but gentlemanlike—Agneta knew
a gentleman when she saw him—master of the house, whom Harry was so
impertinent as to call to his face ‘the Miller,’ he was even a more
wonderful novelty than his sister.
Agneta prized all the enchanting wonder, strangeness, and freedom of
the new world she had entered, with the vivid appreciation of a girl
who had been kept strictly in leading-strings all her days, who had
followed one narrow, worn path till it was direly commonplace and stale
to her, who, in the middle of a continual round of book-teaching, was
as profoundly ignorant of the work-a-day world, and the struggling,
suffering, rejoicing, sorrowing life lived on every side of her, as if
she were a novice in a convent parlour.
To rise two or three hours before her accustomed time the one day, to
have breakfast standing on the parlour table till noon the next—since
Harry was fitful, to say the least, in his practices of getting up
and taking his meals—formed an agreeable variety on Miss Dennison’s
petrified virtues of punctuality and method. To be invested with the
important functions involved in pouring out coffee for Harry and Horry
was flattering to Agneta’s still starved vanity. To have no tasks in
Ariosto, Corneille, and Schiller—which, though custom enabled her to
get through them glibly, the absence of all student affinities rendered
irksome—was a sensible relief to her. Instead, Agneta could dawdle in
the porch or in the shadow of the great pear-tree in the paddock, and
read one of Harry’s red-and-yellow railway-stall volumes. She could not
dip far into it, certainly, without noticing that it was as horribly
‘loud’ inside as out. But it was also new and exciting like everything
else on this untrodden ground. Its characters bounced and struggled
after a robust fashion, did not trip or stalk in a shadowy manner, as
the heroes and heroines of her classics had tripped and stalked to
Agneta.
To be exonerated from practising was another huge boon to a girl who
was not intensely musical, and to whom the news that there was no
piano in the house sounded the best of jokes.
The small, austerely plain farmhouse, with the ‘lean-to’ preserving
a venerable houseleek which flaunted over the greater portion of the
sloping roof, was out of all proportion to its large offices where they
stood massed together,
‘Warm with the breath of kine.’
The voices of poultry resounded through the shaggy paddock. Cowslips
and primroses, as well as daisies, flourished in their season, among
the uncut grass, and the white buttons of mushrooms showed themselves
conspicuously among the seeded flowers and withered leaves of autumn.
The dairy and kitchen were by far the largest rooms in the farmhouse,
so that Agneta felt justified in haunting them, even without the
inducement of playing at making butter and cheese, and baking home-made
bread, much as Harry and Horry played at cutting down and gathering in
sheaves, and driving home and stacking the corn. Agneta found another
excuse in hopeless endeavours to sketch the great open chimney-place,
and its clumsy oven piled round with billets of wood; or a section of
the dark beams of the low roof which Harry’s middle-aged housekeeper
had already hung again thickly, as of old, with red and white beef
and bacon, brown nets full of pale green onions, and bunches of olive
and sage-coloured pot-herbs; or the wooden trap stair which ascended
to a room above, that Harry, like a true farmer, had immediately
appropriated to himself because it lacked a partition on the kitchen
side, and from the narrow elevated platform, looking down into the
yawning gulf beneath, Harry was supposed to inspect and address his
farm servants assembled of a morning, to give in their reports and
receive his orders.
Of course there was no accommodation in either of the two tiny
parlours for morning callers, or dinner guests—who must have come to
dine before they came to call, or so much as had lunch—a topsy-turvy
reversal of all household arrangements hitherto known to Agneta, which
fascinated her like every other unapprehended possibility of primitive
housekeeping. As to an evening party, with hired music, dancing, ices
and supper anywhere else save spread like a gipsy tea on the rough
grass of the paddock, Agneta laughed the low tuneful laugh which was
almost as purely gleeful as Harry’s, at the mere absurdity of the
picture conjured up by the imagination.
But who wanted morning callers, or the wittiest diners-out, such as
Agneta had heard her Aunt Julia talk of, or even the best waltzer in
London—whom anybody could have, so soon as she was presented and came
out—down here at Copley Grange Farm with the boys in their retreat?
Harry hunted for hens’ and ducks’ eggs with Agneta in the poultry
and straw yards and by the pond, just as he had formerly hunted
with her for blackbirds’ and chaffinches’ nests in the shrubberies
at Thornley Lodge. He took her, too, every day to his stables and
cowhouse, and he had promised she should milk a cow before she left.
He let her accompany him and Horry when the weather was fine to the
fields, and when it was bad to the barn, to watch the operations of the
thrashing-mill and fanners. He had helped her to climb up once beside
him, to a throne of sheaves in a corn-cart, and driven her in triumph
into the yard, which Agneta held for the moment to be much better than
occupying the box-seat on a drag, as most girls had an opportunity of
doing on some occasion in their lives.
CHAPTER XVIII.
OLIVER’S LECTURE ON WORDSWORTH.
The next public appearance which Oliver made was in delivering a
lecture on Wordsworth in the town-hall, which was readily lent to any
respectable lecturer, native or foreign, who undertook to enlighten
or please the townspeople. Courses of lectures were not uncommon in
Friarton, though more frequently delivered in winter than at any other
season, but no tradesman had ever before stood at the lecturer’s desk
improvised for the occasion.
Oliver could bring himself to read a lecture as he could sing a song.
He had read prize essays before an audience at once more critical and
a good deal more aggressive. Though Friarton did not form an exception
to the great rule of a man’s not being a prophet in his own country,
he was not likely to be bidden speak out and turn over his leaf by the
most sarcastic of his fellow-citizens.
After much reflection, Oliver had come to the conclusion that a lecture
from him might be useful and acceptable, and he had wished to give it
at once that he might not interfere with the courses of lectures which
Mr. Fremantle and others were wont to read to select circles, generally
with some distinctly charitable or purely intellectual object in view,
from November to February.
Besides, Oliver was reluctant to let the autumn pass without an attempt
to rouse those of his neighbours with whom he had cast in his lot
to take their share of the wealth which was free to them. After his
experience at the annual excursion, and at the Friarton floricultural
and horticultural show, where it was evident so much energy was spent
on raising Brobdingnag cabbages and roses, he suspected that the book
of nature, with all its higher teaching, was closed to his class even
beyond other classes. He wished to do what he could to show how much
good as well as beauty existed in the world simply for the taking,
and how deeply and vitally humanity was interested in the grand and
terrible, and fair and sweet framework around it. The pleasant little
episode of the discovery he had made in Miss Nancy Barr had influenced
him to a certain extent, but there must have been another less purely
public-spirited inducement muddling Oliver’s brains, or else, young
man of dreams and aspirations as he was—and to such an individual it
is hard to say what misconception is too grotesque and outrageous—he
could not have gone so wide of the mark as to choose Wordsworth of
all writers to fire over the heads of his fellow-tradesmen. He might
more judiciously have selected the most difficult question of the
most difficult play of Shakespeare, the problem of the madness or
non-madness of Hamlet, the theory of the morality of Timon of Athens,
and offered it to those excellent people as a nut to crack. And Oliver
ought to have known, and did know, in a form of knowledge undigested
and unapplied—as it appeared in this instance—that while ballad
literature is the first conscious intellectual effort of a people, in
genuine old ballads the references to nature are few and simple. It
is only when man is unconsciously in a state of nature, or when he is
in an advanced stage of culture, that he looks into nature as into a
mirror, and sees all humanity and the God of humanity reflected in it.
The truth was, Oliver happened to be a young man in more than in
reforming zeal, and when he used Wordsworth as a weapon, he had,
whether he knew it or not, a private as well as a public end in his
mind, for which he burned to employ the philosophy of the chief of the
Lake school.
When Oliver offered himself as lecturer, he was well enough received.
Mr. Fremantle and the rest of Oliver’s old patrons were positively
gracious in volunteering their support. Possibly, the manner in which
they had first taken up and then dropped their former _protégé_ for his
fidelity to trade, had left a little compunction in their minds which
rendered them all the blander when an opportunity presented itself for
patronising him again without compromising their own principles; though
such jars occurred, as when Mr. Wright, intending to be complimentary,
suggested that Oliver might lecture in his university hood and gown, to
which the future lecturer answered bluntly, he saw no good in that, he
would as soon show himself in a cap and apron.
The tradespeople, for once, were not offended that one of themselves
should do something which all the others could not do, and which they
were, therefore, generally pleased to taboo as out of their way.
Happily, they regarded Oliver’s purpose as a vindication of their
right to do as their customers did, to be as good as they were, nay,
a deal better. Because they were the great shopkeeping class with its
distinguishing virtues. The tradespeople were at once the thews and
sinews and the salt of the nation. They supplied alike its necessaries
and luxuries. There was ten times more capital spread over their
tills and banking accounts than was to be found in the pockets and
cheque-books of their professional brethren.
The shopkeepers were the pillars of the pure dissenting churches.
It was largely by the votes of the lower middle-class that members
got into Parliament, so that it was by the shopkeepers—as they were
tempted to boast, without any idea of being profane—that ‘Kings
reigned, and princes dispensed justice.’ The shopkeeping ranks of
England, with their vigour, their substance, their stake in the
prosperity of the country, their stolid but supreme self-assertion, far
excelled in power (let the world be thankful) the brute force of the
great unwashed.
The tradespeople of Friarton accepted Oliver as their champion for
the time being, and prepared to go _en masse_ to hear him, in order
to show he was their lecturer. He was not to have a mere handful
of an audience, not even of the out-and-out gentry, but of the
shabby-genteel, such as Mr. Fremantle was content to address. Oliver
was to air his abilities and their college training, demonstrating that
he was as far before a schoolmaster-parson like Fremantle in profane
scholarship, as the shopkeepers’ pastor, Mr. Holland, was in advance of
the clerk in holy orders in spiritual gifts.
Old Dadd proved nearly the solitary defaulter. ‘I make a point, Mr.
Oliver, of attending no lectures save those in the chapel on Sunday
evenings,’ he explained. ‘Yes, yes, I understand you perfectly, sir,
that you are to speak after shop hours, but that is the very time when
I compare my invoices, make myself acquainted with the prices and read
anything else I care to see in the papers. Lectures ain’t in my line,
and I am too old a boy to take up with new courses, I leave ’em to the
young people. Mrs. Dadd—not that she is so much younger, as, like the
rest of the ladies, she would have us believe—and my son Jack will
represent the family for its credit and yours.’
‘If you care to see me, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Dadd, with her
propensity to make herself scarce.
‘Of course he does,’ interrupted Jack; ‘even an old woman counts. You
can thump with your umbrellar at the applause. Trust us for crying
you up to the skies, Constable,’ was the cheerful assurance of Jack,
who had never heard the verb _claquer_, or guessed its effect in
metropolitan theatres.
‘If you’ll listen to me—that is all I want,’ said Oliver.
‘Oh! if it’s the independent dodge, and standing on your own merits,
you’re after, we can be as quiet as mice,’ said Jack, a little offended
at the indifferent reception of his pledge.
‘My dear, we are the most highly favoured of mortals,’ Mrs. Hilliard
told Catherine at dinner.
‘Are we?’ asked Catherine, sceptically, looking at the partridge on her
plate, as if she lamented its early, piteous fate, and did not know how
to eat it.
‘My great-cousin Oliver—his surname should have been Cromwell, not
Constable—will deign to hold forth for our benefit in the town-hall
on Tuesday evening.’
‘What about?’ enquired Catherine without much interest, still picking
at her partridge as if she saw it flying over the stubble.
‘How should I know? On the duty of girls taking bread-sauce and
pegging—not picking—at the food on their plates. I don’t know what
will become of you, child; you despise bread-sauce, you are too fine
for mint-sauce, and as for onion-sauce—to which I am base enough to
incline, though I do it in strict privacy, as you will bear me witness,
and avoid all respectable company for the rest of the day—I wonder you
can sit in the same room with it and me.’
‘I am not fine,’ denied Catherine; then, returning to the charge with
a gleam of animation, ‘I should like to know what Oliver Constable is
going to lecture upon.’
‘I should say on the model trader, whose biography has been so often
written; the poor boy who finds a rusty horse-shoe, sells it for old
iron, and dies the possessor of the most perfect racing stud in the
kingdom.’
‘That would not suit his views,’ objected Catherine.
‘I dare say I have spoilt the example,’ said Mrs. Hilliard innocently;
‘and when one thinks of it, Oliver would have the boy gathering
horse-shoes till he was grey-headed, though in the interval he should
find time and opportunity to learn to read, clean himself, and use
a knife and fork. Of course he must take to moralising on the first
artificer in brass and iron, and find illustrations of the work of his
successors in the sword, the plough, and the pen—steel pens would come
in so nicely to finish the peroration. I should not be surprised, after
all, if the lecturer were to let the model trader alone—I am sure he
deserves a little rest—and give us the natural history of a bit of
bread, beginning with seed corn, and ending with—it ought not to be
a slice of loaf, a macaroon is a much higher and more artistic product
of the oven,’ said Mrs. Hilliard gravely, while she inspected carefully
through her eye-glass a plate of macaroons on the sideboard. ‘It will
be a revelation to Fan, who is said to live under the impression that
loaves grow somewhere, out of sight, behind the shop, doubtless, as the
bread-fruit tree flourishes in the South Sea Islands. You know she is
too good a Christian to fail to be aware that manna only fell from the
skies for a time, to the Jews, when Moses was leading them through the
wilderness.’
‘I don’t need such enlightenment, and I shall not go,’ said Catherine.
‘What, not to hear Oliver exalt his vocation, and establish
satisfactorily that, without bread, we should all be cannibals again
soon, I suppose; for what with pleuro-pneumonia and _rinderpest_,
there would not be nearly enough animals left for us, and of those
which were left, we could not depend upon their wholesomeness and
appetising attractions. I should not like to try dogs and rats and
mice—not if I went to China to acquire the proper taste.’
‘I don’t care for exaggeration,’ said Catherine, with her customary
candour.
‘Neither in sense, nor in nonsense, which means neither in the master
baker, nor in me. Well, I did hear Oliver was going to be quite
commonplace, and serve up some poet.’
‘Which?’ enquired Catherine, with more curiosity than she had yet
displayed.
‘Wordsworth. He is going to let us see what a primrose is when it is
more than a yellow primrose by the river’s brim and at the cottage
door, when it is in a spring bonnet. Why did Wordsworth not give the
last important position? It must have existed in his day, though
crewel work had not yet been revived. At present, I am certain our
principal considerations in reference to primroses, are how they will
look on the borders of table-covers, or on the pockets and bibs of
aprons.’
‘Speak for yourself, Louisa,’ said Catherine, roused to indignation
as her cousin had meant her to be. ‘Some of us have still the grace
to think of primroses wet with dew, beneath green hedgerows, under
April skies. But I wish he had not chosen Wordsworth; I think he is a
mistake.’
‘The greatest mistake possible, my dear.’ Mrs. Hilliard confirmed the
opinion with alacrity. ‘Quite an anachronism. He ought to have been a
typical burgher, like those Flemish cloth-workers in the middle ages.’
Catherine stared for a second with wide-open blue eyes. ‘Oh!’ she
drew a long breath; ‘I did not mean Oliver Constable, I was speaking
of Wordsworth. Of course he wrote some very beautiful things,’ she
continued gravely. ‘Surely his greatest opponent would not willingly
lose his ’Ode to Immortality.’
‘I cannot dignify myself by calling myself a poet’s greatest opponent,
I am such a mere mortal. And I confess I never read the ode; the less
loss to me, that I am sure I should not understand a word of it,’ said
Mrs. Hilliard, with undisturbed complacency, as she helped herself to
grapes.
Catherine was not listening. She was getting more and more into the
habit of not attending to a great deal of the conversation around her,
and looking as if she were speaking to invisible hearers. ‘I could
never speak of Wordsworth as Macaulay and Madame Bunsen wrote,’ she
went on in answer to her own thoughts, as if they had been audible
remarks. ‘Indeed, I cannot forgive them for it.’
‘Catherine, have you forgotten your catechism?’ remonstrated Mrs.
Hilliard; ‘and I dare say poor Macaulay and Madame Bunsen did not
understand Wordsworth any more than I should have done.’
Catherine paid no heed to the interruption, and showed that spoken
soliloquy is still natural to some people. ‘Yet I believe there is a
great deal of truth in the criticism that Wordsworth sacrificed his
powers to an intellectual hobby, and brought down poetry to tedious,
if rather fine prose, by insisting on idealising the tritest, most
wretchedly dull subjects, though I suppose he would have said nothing
is either trite or dull when rightly looked at. Upon the whole I prefer
Crabbe. There was method in his madness. He was more dramatic, if he
idealised less.’
‘I wish there was method in your madness, and that you idealised less.
Do you hear, Catherine? Will you have grapes?’
‘Yes, thanks. I am going to take back my word, Louisa; I should like to
hear Oliver Constable’s lecture.’
‘Of course you would. All the world, including the great shopkeepers,
will be there. I, for one, would not miss the lecture on any account,
though I expect no more edification than I shall get from observing
Mrs. Fremantle looking suavely over the heads of the Polleys and Dadds,
while every rustle of Mrs. Polley’s Sunday gown will deliver the
challenge, “I pay my way. I have as good a right to be here as any of
you. I can do without your custom if you like to take it away; my word!
you will miss me more than I shall miss you. Besides, Oliver Constable
is our man.” I say, Catherine, it cannot be that Oliver Constable is
flirting with one of those Polley girls? People say so, you know.
Now, I can stand a good deal, but one must stop somewhere, and I
really could not swallow that. The Constables are my own relations,
and Oliver and Fan have been educated like other people. Though they
are eccentric, they are presentable, and don’t take advantage of
kinship. But imagine what it would be to have Mrs. Polley claiming me
for a family connection, when, of course, I should have to admit the
claim, while her daughter addressed me as ‘cousin’. That would try my
liberal-mindedness.’
Catherine showed herself a little startled when this suggestion was
deliberately made to her, but she looked it steadily in the face. ‘Why
not,’ she asked quietly a moment afterwards, ‘if the couple suit each
other? Oliver Constable must know, so far as it refers to himself.
Perhaps the Polleys are not so much worse than other girls.’
In making the last despondent reflection, she was influenced by the
recollection of nieces of Mrs. Wright’s, whom Catherine Hilliard had
encountered lately, and whom she was accustomed to style to herself
‘low-minded girls,’ after she found that they divided their time pretty
equally between dressing, taking their meals, and playing lawn-tennis.
‘Are you liberal-minded, Louisa?’ Catherine began to speculate next.
‘Don’t cross-question me,’ cried Mrs. Hilliard; ‘I won’t have one of
my own dining-room chairs converted into a witness-box. There are
liberal-mindedness and liberal-mindedness. The French, the wittiest
nation in Europe, invented that splendid definition. I am ready to
depose solemnly that I never professed to be a chartist or a communist
or a red republican—nothing of the kind. I only call myself a friendly
easy-going sort of woman, who would not condescend to turn her back on
her kindred, and who could not do without her neighbours to laugh with
and laugh at. Therefore she was not disposed to weed out her visiting
list at Friarton to a few straggling aspirants to gentility. But
if Oliver Constable commit a marriage with one of the Miss Polleys,
I shall turn my coat and become as exclusive as Mrs. Wright. Her
father was actually a fashionable London physician, who drove about
in a pill-box and attended peers and aldermen for their gout and fine
ladies and citizenesses for their nerves. Think how his daughter has to
condescend to us country clodhoppers! By the way, I may as well turn
my coat as you take back your word. I am glad, my love, that you do
anything so nineteenth century and fallible—so unlike a vestal virgin
or a _précieuse ridicule_.’
Oliver was taking one step to which Fan had no objection.
Harry Stanhope, with a curious echo of old and young Dadd, told Oliver:
‘I say, old man, lectures ain’t in my way, as you know, but I’ll see
you through yours.’ Agneta also expressed her full intention of being
present. But as it happened, when the evening came, no Stanhope put in
an appearance. They had been decoyed away by some prospect of greater
entertainment elsewhere. Agneta admitted afterwards that she had left
the schoolroom too lately to relish lectures, any more than Harry cared
for them.
But in spite of the Stanhopes’ desertion, if Oliver’s sole or even
principal intention had been to bring together the upper and lower
middle classes of Friarton, and unite them superficially, by a common
bond of interest for one evening, he might have been satisfied. But
unfortunately, his aspirations went far beyond these modest results.
The lecturer began stiffly with involuntary bodily contortions which
monopolised much of the attention, and were fruitful in small titters
and grins from the ’Mily Polleys and Jack Dadds among the audience.
Mrs. Hilliard neither tittered nor grinned. She looked preternaturally
sedate, but her grey eyes danced under the great flat expanse of her
forehead.
Catherine Hilliard leant back in her chair perfectly unstirred
to mirth. Her hands were loosely clasped in her lap. A shade of
expectation kindled a little light in the face, which under its warmly
tinted hair looked like
That orbèd maiden,
White—fire-laden,
Whom mortals call the moon,
walking in the night, or a flower blossoming in the shade. Yet
Catherine was not without a perception of comedy. She could laugh when
she could find anything laughable to her; the misfortune was, this
occurred seldom. For her sense of the ridiculous had not, by any means,
outgrown and dwarfed all her other faculties—a result which may be
found not only in old court fools and in many of the village imbeciles
of every generation, but also in a large number of men and women who
have special pretensions to wisdom and wit.
When Oliver warmed with his subject, his gestures grew less and less
awkward, the tendency to grimace disappeared, and something of the
natural dignity of the man shone forth from his goodly physique.
But alas! his audience did not warm with him, though the want of
sympathy, while it went to his heart, had not the power to damp his
enthusiasm so as to rob him of the advantage he derived from it. As
Oliver discoursed on the nobility and beauty which underlie all God’s
creation and are never utterly absent, however foully or meanly marred
in his fearful and wonderful handiwork man; as he bade his listeners
recognise the high heroism of a rude old Westmoreland shepherd; the
essential refinement of a bareheaded, barefooted, Highland girl; as
he urged them to examine and ascertain for themselves the exquisite
perfection of much they might be tempted to overlook, or undervalue
as trifles light as air, or as possessions too universal to be of the
slightest value, gaping impatience and scorn took the place of titters
and grins, with few exceptions.
‘Did you ever hear such radical rant—praising them pedlars and leech
gatherers and the whole band of wandering vagabonds?’ Mrs. Polley
was moved to whisper to the daughter next her, during a pause in
the selection of some of the quotations with which the lecture was
graced. ‘I would not buy a reel of cotton from the one, or trust a
silver spoon within a mile of t’other of them tramps. I would never
have evened Oliver Constable to be guilty of this. I declare I begin
to be frightened of this here young man. Mark my words, Ann, he’ll
not stop where he has begun. It is fair impudence to deliver such a
lecture to well-to-do, respectable people. As for his trash about
birds’ eggs and daisies, why it is fit only for a parcel of children!
He’ll be proposing Polley and me to go a bird-nesting and threading of
daisy-chains next.’
‘I would not say it to everybody, because Constable is a personal
friend,’ said Jack Dadd with ostentatious loyalty, ‘but I must
say I prefer a lecture in the chapel from the Dutchman when he’s
sending us all to pot. We mayn’t take the whole in, and it ain’t
agreeable—exactly, to be called bad names, though it’s what we bargain
for from a parson, but when he comes it strong and hot it is more
rousing. If this is what you call poetry, ’Liza, you and Constable may
keep it to yourselves and welcome.’
‘But this ain’t what I call poetry,’ protested ’Liza, doubly wounded;
‘I never read anything like it. No poetry I ever heard of, or cared
for, could be about common old women and idiot boys. I have read about
outlaws and brigands, but they are out of the common as well as knights
and troubadours; I must say for myself, I always preferred lords
and ladies. As for lovers—and everybody knows most poetry is on the
tender passion—’ simpered ’Liza, ‘who would stop to hear how an old
married couple—like father and mother for instance, only a great deal
worse when you come to low clanjamphrey of weavers and shepherds, get
on or fall out? They are married for better, for worse, and must pull
together, and there’s an end of them.’
‘Don’t object to father just now,’ said ’Mily, ‘for if he had not
fallen asleep—small blame to him—and snored so that I had to stuff
my handkerchief into my mouth to keep myself from laughing right out
every time he struck in, I should either have fallen asleep myself, or
I could not have sat to the end of the drone. Call this cleverness and
the good of a university education! Then I am glad I ain’t clever in
the same way and that I have not even been away at a boarding-school,
though I used to tease mother to send me from home—just for the name
of the thing. I should have hated the learning and snapped my fingers
in the schoolmistress’s face, I dare say, before I was done.’
These open objections were the echo of the prevailing sentiments of a
large proportion of the audience. With regard to another section there
was decorous respect for Wordsworth. Public opinion has changed since
the criticism in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ was penned. Mrs. Hilliard was
singular in her freedom of speech—most people pretended or tried hard
to admire the poet, at least, while they strangled their tell-tale
yawns and came to the conclusion that Oliver Constable was casting
pearls before swine, the swine being the herd of tradespeople. Such
hearers sat through Oliver’s lecture with a commendable appearance of
attention. They knew what was due both to him and themselves, not to
say to Wordsworth, in their relative positions. Only a fine sprinkling
of choice sympathisers—turning up sometimes, like Miss Nancy Barr,
when least expected—responded to the lecturer with all their hearts.
But Catherine Hilliard was not in the last slender detachment any
more than in the others. She did not go with the multitude. Neither
could she be converted in an hour, though she realised that Oliver
woke up to his office, burst some of his bonds, and ended by lecturing
and speaking well. Certainly her lips fell a little apart in wistful
appreciation, and delicate light and colour came into the subdued
pallor of her face when he quoted
Lo! five blue eggs lie gleaming there,
and called the daisy
A queen in crown of rubies drest;
but she lacked full humanity, and could not follow him in his
fellow-feeling with Betty Foy and Peter Bell. She still thought
Wordsworth had made a huge mistake in his vocation, and that Oliver
Constable had capped him with a blunder as gross. Even if he would
choose Wordsworth, why did he not read from ‘The Horn of Egremont
Castle,’ or ‘The White Doe of Rylstone,’ as more fit for a popular
assembly than the ‘Ode to Immortality’ could be? No; Macaulay might
be deplorably intolerant in recording—were it for his private
satisfaction—the judgment he had formed, and Madame Bunsen might be
singularly inappreciative where such a woman was concerned, but there
was ground for their censure though none for their contempt. And Oliver
Constable would have done far better to have selected one of the ‘Lays
of Ancient Rome’—even with its classic story and unfamiliar names—for
Friarton ears.
CHAPTER XIX.
AN ILLUSION.
Oliver Constable, watching the young aristocratic beauty Agneta
Stanhope masquerading with her brothers, thought of Marie Antoinette
essaying a Dresden china shepherdess’s life at Little Trianon. He
judged that Marie Thérèse’s high-spirited, frolicsome daughter, whose
fair-haired beauty, in its flower, was not without its buxomness,
princess and queen though she was, had less refined traits, so far as
he could make out from her early pictures, till terrible misfortune
lent the face tragic majesty, than were to be found in the pale,
delicately cut little features of this simply well-born English girl
who had been brought up in the calculated shade, seclusion, and
exclusivism, of an aristocratic schoolroom, with only a formal walk, or
ride or drive for exercise, while she had remained totally uninitiated
in the swimming, rowing, and skating exercises which are beginning at
last to be allowed to diversify more elderly forms of ‘constitutionals’
for the girls of the upper ten thousand. Agneta’s lawn games even had
been generally affairs of two, with one of the two what Harry would
have called ‘a confirmed duffer and fogy,’ while the girl’s early romps
with her schoolboy brothers had been few and far between.
Agneta Stanhope was in perfect health of body and mind, yet she
appeared at Copley Grange Farm like a hothouse flower which had never
been exposed to sun or wind, while welcoming them with such a sweet
exultant wooing of their tanning, hardening influences, as added to
the grace of her ignorance and helplessness—such ignorance and
helplessness as charm in a gentle young foreigner who is all frankness
and guilelessness, and willingly makes herself at home in a hitherto
unexplored region, of which the rude simplicity alone is perceptible
to her. In such a _rôle_ Agneta Stanhope was still more engaging and
interesting than beautiful. Indeed her greatest claim to beauty lay
in the air of exquisite tender fragility—which had to do with her
rearing, but not with her character, not even with her constitution,
in spite of her slight figure, which, however, was elastic and wiry
enough—and the sky-blueness of her eyes—like Harry’s, very unlike
Catherine Hilliard’s—set in a miniature face, the colour of which
inclined to that of a lily rather than of a rose, when she came
first, though a single week’s life with her brothers brought into
the soft cheeks a tinge of the red which qualifies the whiteness of
apple-blossom.
It was really in all respects as if Agneta Stanhope were visiting
her brothers in one of the distant colonies to which they had been
originally destined, though she was not reduced to washing her clothes
or baking her bread; certainly she would not have objected to these
sports in her ignorance of what they led to. On the one hand, she was
childishly ignorant, a creature who had never stood alone or thought
for herself, or been conscious of a single responsibility to her
fellow-creatures since she was born, while—like Catherine Hilliard
here—neither had she been of vital consequence to anybody, or been
cherished and petted, as might well have been the lot of such a girl
in different circumstances. She had suffered a curiously crippling
experience of life on two sides of her nature. On another, she was
precocious, and early instructed in obligations, necessities, and
experiences; but this element in her education and second nature was
not on the surface or readily perceived.
Agneta was not likely, even if fortune in the person of her Aunt Julia
favoured her present wishes, to stay long enough at Copley Grange
Farm for yeoman life to pall upon her. And when she was wearied in
the least, she took refuge—the power of changing her place when and
how she liked was another allurement to her—with her own and her
brothers’ friends at Friarton Mill. Agneta could not draw the nice
lines of distinction which were so skilfully defined by the magnates of
Friarton. She was blind enough in her youthful obtuseness not to see
magnates in the town. What was the great difference between the master
of a grammar school who taught Latin or mathematics, the doctor who
felt pulses, the old established family solicitor and banker who drew
out wills and leases and counted sovereigns, even the vicar, who wrote
sermons and took a class in the Sunday-school, and Oliver Constable,
who ruled over working-men indeed, instead of boys, clerks, and
curates, but who had been at Oxford with her brothers and who lived in
such a perfect old place as Friarton Mill?
In what respect was Oliver Constable’s sister, who had been educated
in good schools at home and abroad, very inferior to the other ladies
in the neighbourhood, whom, in her heart of hearts, Agneta Stanhope
appearing so humble in that innocent youth—of which at the same time
arrogance is perhaps the commoner immature accompaniment—never dreamt
of reckoning her own equals?
Agneta was actually disposed to put more weight on the line of yeomen,
from which the Constables had sprung, than on the fashionable London
doctor, who was the father of one of the master’s wives, or on the
gallant major in the line from whom another lady claimed descent.
Agneta showed herself extremely perverse where the best houses in
Friarton were concerned. To her there was no particular goodness about
them; and they had not the glamour of the farm and mill-houses. The
Friarton drawing-rooms, from Mrs. Hilliard’s downwards, were only more
or less sorry reflections of the drawing-room at home, they were not
at all like the delicious little parlours—all chimney-corners and
cupboards, at Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill.
Agneta was just a trifle haughty and reserved when Harry took her among
the professional people in Friarton, and all the time she was as gay
as a lark, and as playful as a kitten, at Friarton Mill. She did not
emulate Harry in winning every heart. She piqued the Friarton ladies
by her neglect and incapacity for measuring their titles to respect.
Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin Catherine formed the only exceptions. Mrs.
Hilliard laughed at Agneta’s preferences, and Catherine simply held
Agneta as a big baby fit to rank with the overgrown school boy her
brother.
Truth to tell, Agneta Stanhope, who was assured of her position, while
she did not approve from principle and instinct of debatable middle
ground, still never so much as imagined that she could compromise
herself by temporary association with people like the Wrights and
Fremantles. It was as a pure matter of taste that she chose to disport
herself among pronounced yeomen and tradespeople, whose habits and
tastes, from an accident of education and a piquancy of flavour, were
the opposite of oppressive to her.
Fan Constable repaid Harry Stanhope’s confidence. She was very good to
Agneta, devoting herself to the girl’s gratification with an abstract
devotion—disinterested, guiltless of ulterior motives, peculiar to the
young woman. It was no matter that Agneta’s pleasures, when they took
the form of seeking for hens’ nests, and carrying the eggs home in the
skirt of her gown, or wishing to milk cows, were not only startling
but wholly antagonistic to Fan’s frame of mind and sense of fitness.
It was rather the old story of the roc’s egg which Fan would have
got at any price for her visitor. Fan in her solemn earnestness and
absolute matter-of-factness, masqueraded too to please Agneta, played
at the ideal miller’s daughter for whom the real miller’s daughter had
been wont to entertain a great contempt, dawdling among the sedges by
Buller’s Brook, sitting among the sacks in the mill gallery, munching
groats with her white teeth, roasting them in the kiln, having herself
weighed in the scales. And when Agneta requested, with fearless
directness and insistance, to be taken to Friarton to see what she
called ‘the ancestral shop,’ and be shown all over the premises in
order to have the complicated processes of making bread rendered clear
to her understanding, Fan went with the young lady without a demur. It
was on this occasion that Fan heard Agneta beg for an unbaked cake, and
pray that Oliver would carve her initials with his penknife on the soft
crust, as if it were the bark of a tree, and he were another Orlando to
her Rosalind, and then entreat that she might put it with her own hand
into the oven, concluding by calling everybody to promise faithfully
that when it came out, _her_ cake should be duly forwarded with the
rest of the bread to Copley Grange Farm.
Fan witnessed the ridiculous performance without more than a fleeting
pang. And if Agneta Stanhope had further taken it into her head—full
of fantastic whims—during the intoxication of these weeks which
formed her first holidays, that she and Fan should fill baskets with
floury loaves and carry them with their own hands to feed the poor,
there would have been some danger of Fan’s complying with the absurd
suggestion, in the height of her infatuation to please Harry Stanhope’s
sister.
Shrewd as Fan was, she became thoroughly taken in by the stranger.
Fan learnt to believe in Agneta, and there was relief and joy in
the belief, as entirely as Fan believed, with more reason where
single-heartedness was concerned, in Harry.
After all, Agneta, though she was fond of Fan, liked Oliver still
better. He was neither her victim nor her slave, though he could not
help admiring what was admirable in her high breeding, and natural
sweetness and affectionateness, and being tolerant and kind to her. He
was not a son of the soil, neither had he been brought up in such total
unfamiliarity with girls of Agneta Stanhope’s stamp that he should fall
down and worship her, caught chiefly by the charm of her conventional
grace and refinement in their contrast with the conventional
uncouthness and vulgarity of the girls he had previously known.
To Oliver Constable’s mind there was a considerable amount of snobbery
and caddishness—an absolute disloyalty to all which lies below the
immediate surface—in this ready subserviency of the self-made man to
the material advantages of the first conventional lady with whom he
comes in close contact. And as fine feathers did not necessarily make
fine birds to Oliver, he had been tempted to feel a grim satisfaction
when he read of such men’s being played with and fooled by exquisite
triflers who had subdued their captives, almost without an effort, by
trifles light as air. ‘Serve the duffers right,’ Oliver had growled.
He had imagined that if he were to love a woman with his whole heart
and soul, it would be the woman independent of the attributes of
any station, the noble woman, who, if she were technically as well
as ideally a lady, would be as indifferent to mere technicalities,
perhaps as weary of them, as Catherine Hilliard often looked.
Oliver Constable stood in no danger of being bound in thrall by Agneta
Stanhope, and his insensibility formed another racy distinction in her
eyes. No doubt in her cloistered schoolroom days, she had not yet begun
her career of conquest. But she had moved in circles where it is the
business of many men’s lives to please women, where it becomes a trick
of habit which keeps the hand in play, even when it is not pursued
for the sake of any individual woman. She had been accustomed, during
her passing glimpses of the world she was to live in, to be outwardly
deferred to, flattered and complimented. Now Mr. Constable, while she
was sure he was incapable of being anything save chivalrously good
to any woman, did not flatter her a bit. He had a strong propensity
to speak the truth always. Sometimes he forgot himself so far as to
take her off almost as he took off his sister, or, worse still, to
lose sight of her existence for the moment, as he lost sight of Fan’s.
Withal, in spite of the brotherly obliviousness, and the difference of
opinion on many points between Oliver and Fan, Agneta could not fail
to see that in the middle of his dry jokes and bitter enough sarcasms,
Oliver Constable regarded his sister far more as his equal than Harry
regarded his sister whom he habitually petted. Mr. Constable consulted
Miss Constable seriously, even when he did not take her advice. But
Harry, though he was sufficiently interested to notice Agneta’s mode
of doing her hair, her changes of dress, her adopted occupations,
and would even, as she was gratefully persuaded few brothers would,
put himself about to contribute to her occupations and render them
agreeable, never talked to her even as he talked to Horry, never made
her the confidante of his schemes and plans, never asked her opinion
on any subject of more consequence than a neck-tie or the cutting of
his hair. Harry would never think of behaving in any other manner to a
girl like Agneta.
Agneta Stanhope was not a born coquette, but she had been taught to
estimate at their proper value all her advantages, whether natural or
acquired. She was well aware, in this her girlhood, that they were the
weapons with which she was to cut her way to fortune—the only fortune
which could possibly await a well-born, fairly attractive girl of her
rank, who had no portion beyond what served for her slender allowance
of pocket-money, though she had influential friends, who could at
least lead her into the arena where she was to secure a creditable
establishment, or prove a failure and remain a poor relation to the end
of her days. There was an obligation on Agneta’s part, to herself as
well as to her kindred, for the future in addition to the present, to
be agreeable, to charm men—that she might grow skilful in the art of
war, that she might not only smite down one antagonist, but overthrow
the foe by sixes and tens, so as to have several suitors to pick and
choose from, with the greater chance of escaping the collapse of a
_mauvais parti_ for a husband.
Certainly, the prevailing burden of her first, and all her succeeding
unmarried seasons, still sat lightly on Agneta Stanhope, yet she was
not without a latent, pervading sense of it, which caused her, in
very sport, to polish and poise her spear, and essay it against any
natural enemy, let him be ever so far beyond the pale of her claims and
requirements.
Thus, Agneta, out of a kind of womanly instinct, though one not
known to the higher order of women, set herself, with her eyes open,
to please Oliver Constable, to beguile him into making it his main
object to please her, and into sliding imperceptibly into platonically
romantic and tender relations with her. Undoubtedly, Agneta was not
so well acquainted with human nature as to anticipate any danger of
scorching her own wings in the process of consuming the heart of
another, far less to measure the degree of injury and suffering which
might be involved in that same casual scorching of her fairy queen and
butterfly attributes. But though she had been wise beyond her years and
before her time, such wisdom would not have sufficed to arrest her in
her course. Her latent high spirits, which became her antecedents, had
survived her lifetime of discipline.
In the dire necessity of subjugating men till they became her open or
secret lovers, she would have said, laughing with good-natured mockery,
at the most distant suspicion of such a peril, ‘if my wings are to be
scorched, let them. I shall survive to flutter them as bravely as ever,
till they are confined by a marriage ring. I must have Mr. Constable
think me nice—the nicest girl he has ever known.’
When Agneta Stanhope turned back her hair, or made it into a silken
fringe for Oliver, as Alice Grey braided her hair for another; when
Agneta set her gipsy hat in the most bewitching fashion at Oliver, and
gathered blackberries in the company of the miller of Friarton Mill
and his sister, the blackberries not being by any means Agneta’s chief
object; when she turned a demure little dissenter, in the teeth of
Fan Constable’s being a loyal churchwoman in right of the Constables’
mother, the curate’s daughter, and drew away the said churchwoman,
to the great edification of Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley, to evening
attendance at the chapel favoured by the shopkeepers, where Oliver
continued to worship as his fathers had worshipped before him; when
Agneta sang her ballads, which, like homely Christian names, had begun
to reappear in her set in proportion as they had died out in lower
circles, her ‘Sweet Homes,’ and ‘Maids of Allanwater,’—the maid having
been a miller’s daughter, let us observe in passing—her ‘Brooks’
and ‘Rosebuds,’ and told her naïve stories of the mild maidenly
adventures she and Miss Dennison had met with in their quiet life,
to Oliver, he showed no sign of perceiving her delicate manœuvres.
He offered only a passive resistance. He stood like a rock assailed
by summer waves rippling back from it with an incessant murmur, or
like a giant Gulliver submitting with a patient, hardly perceptible
shrug of his shoulders, awkward man as he was in his invulnerability,
because he could not avoid the assault, to the airy overtures of a fair
Lilliputian, who, reaching up on tiptoe, did not attain to the height
of his knee.
Harry Stanhope opened his eyes wide, and laughed aloud at the fine,
and, of course, perfectly decorous little farce. ‘What a desperate
flirt that monkey Aggie is going to prove, to be sure,’ he remarked
to his gossip Horace; ‘barely out of the nursery, yet ready to fly
at game like Constable! What would the child do with him if she did
succeed in bringing him down? He would cumber her bag at starting, with
a vengeance. Not Aunt Julia’s game, eh, Horry? But the old man can take
care of himself, though he is as much in earnest in his way as his
sister is in hers, and would be fit to do something outrageous if he
were winged. The chit knows what she is about also, and, as no harm can
come of it, she may be left to amuse herself, after the fashion of her
kind.’
If Harry had not given _carte blanche_ Horry might have called it a
positive disgrace for Aggie to attempt a flirtation with a man in
Constable’s position, forgetting for the moment that he and Harry had
elected to be yeomen, and that Agneta could therefore be viewed as the
sister of two yeomen. But the oracle had spoken, and silenced any
voice Horry might have exercised in the matter.
It was sensible, severe Fan Constable who looked on at the play which
sometimes provoked, and sometimes amused Oliver—for he was a young man
and so susceptible to various influences—with glistening eyes and a
throbbing heart. Was there more than one, true aristocrat, forgetful,
not simply of self, but of the world? Might the friendship between
Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill be cemented by a double alliance?
Fan was the last girl in the world to stoop, even for the purpose of
conquering. If she did not receive allegiance unsought, she would
never, by premeditation and with design, seek it. But she could find no
condemnation for the doings of her new friend. All Fan’s blame was for
Oliver, who continued, or pretended to continue, utterly insensible to
the wonderful irresistible honour conferred upon him. Fan discovered
springs of sympathy with Agneta, while she had no patience with Oliver.
She was impelled to say something to him one evening when brother and
sister had just parted from the Stanhopes and seen them go on their
way through Copley Grange Park to the Farm. The group lingered on the
road, in order to go up close to the half-shut-up house, examine the
objectionable façade, and stand—figures in keeping—in the portico,
while they ascertained for themselves how Friarton Mill looked from
the great house in whose prospect it was understood to form such an
ornament. The two Constables, on their part, stood on their own side of
the Brook in the mill-house court.
‘I am not fond of gushing, I believe,’ said Fan, slowly and
deliberately, as if she were making a searching analysis of her private
propensities. ‘As a rule, I am convinced I am not fond of superlatives
or caressing expressions’—speaking with studied moderation—‘but I
will say’—becoming ardent at a bound—‘Miss Stanhope, Agneta—I may
call her behind her back as well as before her face, since she has
asked me to call her by her Christian name,’ proclaimed Fan, with
honest, affectionate pride in the permission—‘is the most lovable,
darling girl I ever met.’
‘She is not a bad specimen of her class, I dare say,’ said Oliver with
provoking impartiality.
‘Oh! Oliver,’ protested Fan, hot and indignant as at an unfeeling
slight to her idol, ‘I am sure her testimony to your merits would be
very different, and—and much warmer. She thinks so much of your good
opinion, too. Oh! Oliver, I am tempted to think you without eyes, or
ears, or heart, and you a young man seeing nobody—here, at least—who
is fit to be mentioned in the same breath with Agneta Stanhope, while
it will be your own fault if——’ Fan stopped in time, she was the
last woman to betray what looked to her upright, unsophisticated
eyes, another woman’s weakness, however transparently that woman might
herself reveal it. Fan had also become aware, in the case of the Polley
girls, who, whatever their offences, had not lost their claim to modest
womanhood, that she could not go nearer to mortally offending her
brother than to hint at an unsolicited preference for him.
Even at the mere implication he grew red again with a manly, modest
man’s shame, mingled now with a strong dash of impatience and scorn.
‘You are grossly mistaken, Fan,’ he said, in the first impulse
of anger; then he recovered himself and went on with a laugh not
altogether forced, ‘Miss Stanhope (Oliver no more called her Agneta
behind her back than to her face) is a little goose—save her young
ladyship’s pretensions; but you are a greater fool than I took you
for, Fannikin, if you imagine for a moment that she is sincere in
more than in making the most of her holiday rustication—this is
life in _villeggiatura_ to her—and in compelling us all to like her.
She and Harry are extravagantly fond of being liked. I am afraid it
don’t answer in his case, but in hers it will cause her to be a very
popular great lady some day, I have no question. She has exceedingly
pretty, gracious, high-bred ways—you hear I grant they are pretty, the
prettier that they are second nature rather than affectation. But she
is also as thorough a woman of the world as if she were ten—twenty
years older, ready to counsel her daughter as Tennyson’s aristocratic
matron instructed her child.’
Fan was utterly incredulous and gravely offended. She would not give up
Agneta Stanhope’s looking upon Fan and her brother as perfect equals,
even if she were not suffered to add that, so far as Agneta’s personal
choice went, she would not have objected to casting in her lot with
them.
Fan was only a little staggered by some words which Harry let fall when
he came over unexpectedly one morning to offer his sister’s excuses for
having been hurried away sooner than she had counted on from the Farm,
without being able to bid good-bye to Miss Constable. For, in truth,
like the sweet, graceful vision that she had flashed upon them, Agneta
Stanhope vanished in a moment, vision-like, out of the Constables’
sphere.
‘Aunt Julia found out that she could send old Jennings and meet Aggie
in time for them to join her and the General at Crewe station and go
on with them to Blackcombe, where the Herveys are to have some special
affair for Dolph’s coming of age. They are old friends and connections
of ours, you know, so it don’t matter that Aggie should be out at their
ball before she has regularly come out of her shell. Ungrateful little
wretch!—she professed to be bitten with our farm life, but wasn’t she
quickly cured when she heard what was in store for her? All the same,’
Harry corrected himself, remembering to whom he was speaking, and
prompted by his natural kindly feeling, ‘she was very sorry that she
could not get over to see and thank you.’
Still in the face of this shock, which Oliver was too magnanimous
to enlarge upon, Fan clung to her faith in Agneta’s eternal
friendship—nay, sisterly affection. Fan was only confirmed in her
tenacious belief by getting an inkling of the fact that not only Mrs.
Hilliard, but all Friarton, not possessing a grain of Oliver’s tender
consideration and unbounded generosity, were laughing at the end of the
temporary alliance between the girls with more exuberant mirth than
charitable sympathy.
CHAPTER XX.
OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED
OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND CO.
There was one man of Friarton descent whose distinguished fortunes
occurred not once only to Fan Constable’s mind as presenting a marked
contrast to her brother’s perverse crotchet of self-destruction, where
his social position and even his material prosperity were concerned.
For any tyro might crave leave to doubt whether Oliver Constable would
increase or even retain the amount of fortune which his father had
bequeathed to him by becoming a tradesman in his own person. As for
Fan, she had been fully persuaded from the first that Oliver would
ruin himself commercially—no less than socially. Oliver denied the
necessity stoutly, and when it was thrust upon him, quoted, as Fan
considered, irrelevantly, if not irreverently, the Divine assertion
that a man’s life does not consist of the things which at the best he
only seems to possess.
Hartley, of the now renowned firm of Hartley, Norris, & Co., had stuck
to trade down to the present generation. But then trade had made of the
representative Hartley not simply a man, but a gentleman so far beyond
challenge that he had not merely been spared from the counting-house
and warehouses to Oxford, he had been permitted to become a sleeping
partner, enjoying the funds without undergoing any of the toils of the
huge, opulent concern which his immediate predecessors had founded,
pushed, and fostered by unremitting exertions, giving themselves heart
and soul to the business.
John Hartley, in his character of pure gainer by the struggles and
victories of his father and partners in their branch of trade, had
developed very much into a cultivated _dilettante_. The chief sign he
gave of having inherited any of the individual vigour and ambition of
his stock, was in the zeal and determination with which he avoided the
slightest association—save by name and the receipt of the lion’s share
of the profits—with the business. Yet, according to Oliver Constable’s
principles, John Hartley stood morally responsible for it in its every
detail, down to its pettiest customer and its meanest workman, while
his responsibility was not confined to his own business and his conduct
in its discharge, but extended to his influence over the whole trading
class, to which, in spite of every protest, he distinctly belonged.
Oliver said he would not judge John Hartley. No doubt the man had an
æsthetic bent, and he was squeamish where one kind of vulgarity was
concerned. These idiosyncrasies led him almost perforce to dedicate
himself to the refining of his tastes and the beautifying of his estate
and house—well-nigh to the same extent as the squire of Copley Grange
dedicated himself to a like evangel. And naturally the sleeping partner
and the squire took to each other’s society, silently agreeing to sink
into oblivion the gulf between the gentle fore-fathers of the one and
the rude progenitors of the other.
John Hartley hit on an earl’s daughter with an equally accommodating
memory to consent to be his wife, and never afterwards to allude,
except by a calm, smiling, cleverly timed jest, which disarmed
criticism and took the censorious world by storm, to the source of the
excess of luxuries with which her husband was able to surround her.
It was no business of Oliver Constable’s, whatever he might think; he
was not called upon to proclaim John Hartley a cowardly shirker and
slurrer over of his obligations, an absentee from his post of duty,
a deserter of his class. Certainly Hartley was not singular in his
interpretation of the rights and privileges of the inheritor of a
great firm and its wealth. He went with the multitude in his use or
abuse of the choice of occupations and interests which he commanded.
Even an earnest, enthusiastic commentator on the ‘grand old name of
gentleman,’ who has proved to the gaping world’s edification that
it may be borne by a tradesman of the most unsavoury sort, has been
forced by the clamorous exigencies of public opinion to allow her hero
a problematical title to gentle birth and to wed him to the noble
daughter of a sorry gentleman; above all—strange incongruity to
promote the pseudo-tradesman to the rank of a squire, and the society
of the country squirearchy, before he dies.
But Oliver was roused from his equanimity when he shared the sensation
felt by all Friarton at the news that John Hartley had come down with
Lady Cicely and their household to be even nearer neighbours to the
Constables than the Stanhopes were, by occupying Copley Grange, lent
to them by the squire, while the sleeping partner showed himself wide
awake in contesting the representation of the county, just left vacant
by the death of the late member.
Hartleys to right of him, Stanhopes to left of him, how could Oliver
resist the admission, for the moment at least, that he was with them
and not with the Dadd and Polley set, to which he had sent in his
adherence? For John Hartley made his first canvassing call on his next
neighbour the miller and baker, and though he did not conceal that he
was at Friarton Mill to solicit political support, he acknowledged
there, as he was prepared to announce on the hustings, that he was a
tradesman, and frankly claimed the vote of a brother-tradesman, who
understood John Hartley’s circumstances and the advantage of returning
him to Parliament.
John Hartley was a quiet agreeable man, handsome, with a slightly
affected assumption of Bohemian fashions in his ferocious beard,
semi-artistic slouched sombrero, and colossal meerschaum. In reality he
had not the slightest taint of the Bohemian about him, being pacific,
prudent, and somewhat obstinate. He had only adopted the gentlemanlike
Bohemian as being the reverse of the gentlemanlike tradesman.
Lady Cicely called on Miss Constable. Lady Cicely was not childish or
girlish, like Agneta Stanhope. The sleeping partner’s partner admired
Friarton Mill in a well-bred way, but she never made the smallest
pretence of going mad for rusticity or of playing at being a rustic.
Neither did she mistake Fan for the typical Miller’s daughter. The
visitor took care, notwithstanding, to infer with perfect tact, all
the while, that she was a little struck by finding Miss Constable
a different person from what might have been expected. Not that
Lady Cicely implied Fan was her equal. Lady Cicely was a stout,
commonplace, slightly stolid young woman—the least gratifying, to a
highly-trained eye, of all John Hartley’s surroundings, so that one had
to consider there was that in her origin which indemnified the mind
for the loss—bordering on an offence—to the eye. Still she was not
without dignity in her double chin, and certainly not without mind;
she never lost sight of the fact, or suffered Fan to lose sight of it
for a moment, though it was by no means insisted on with unladylike
self-assertion, it was quietly taken for granted, that an earl’s
daughter and a tradesman’s daughter belonged to opposite poles of
society which no two people in their senses could confuse. But she
administered the same subtle compensation bestowed by Agneta Stanhope,
when the couple of aristocrats agreed in placing Fan quite on a level
with her former Friarton patronesses.
In addition, Lady Cicely civilly and sensibly recognised the points
in common between her husband and Oliver Constable, and connected the
men together by the safe general term ‘business men.’ ‘Mr. Hartley
has never taken an active part in the affairs of his firm, he leaves
everything to his partners,’ she was so good as to explain to Fan; ‘but
of course the interests of trade are his interests, and he will look
after them in the House if he is returned for the county. He and Mr.
Constable ought to have a great deal to say to each other, so that we
depend on your brother’s dining with us next week at the Grange. He
must reserve a day for us when we are quite by ourselves—you will
keep him in mind—won’t you?’ Lady Cicely almost pled with Fan, though
she never dreamt of including the sister, who smiled a little grimly at
the significant omission, in the invitation to the brother.
Lady Cicely was too comfortably resigned and independent on her own
account to care much for public favour, but, like a dutiful wife,
she coveted it, so far as she saw her way to it, for her husband.
She desired to see him in Parliament because so many of her set were
there. She did not trouble herself much about Mr. Hartley’s being in
trade—so many people whom she knew had something to do with trade
now-a-days—still it was advisable that he should be pointed out as
M.P. for his native county, as well as sleeping partner in Hartley,
Norris, & Co.
After all, Fan did not find fault altogether with the Hartleys’
self-interested notice. It was fully understood to be a give-and-take
connection. It had none of that sole prerogative of bestowing
honour—to which Fan had so bitterly objected in former days. To be
sure, the Hartleys were not like the royally frank and free Stanhopes.
Oh, no. Mr. Hartley and Lady Cicely would never raise their social
inferiors by generous adoption into the upper ranks, or even stoop
magnanimously to the lower. Though indeed, had Oliver Constable so
chosen, it was in his power to be, in his degree, the man of university
training and wide travel, the polished man of civilised society, who
had shaken himself loose from all save the money earned by trade, which
John Hartley showed himself with the approbation of everybody, save a
few fanatics.
But Oliver might make use of the Hartleys, as the Hartleys were
plainly disposed to make use of him. Fan was ready in this silent,
mutual compact, to be of benefit to the Hartleys; she returned Lady
Cicely’s call, though Fan was not to dine at Copley Grange—since
it was necessary to draw the line somewhere—and in the course of
the call consented to the hostess’s extracting a considerable amount
of available information about the place and people from the guest.
Fan spoke to her acquaintances down to the Polleys and Dadds of Lady
Cicely’s neighbourliness and willingness to confer her countenance on
Friarton, in return for Friarton’s votes to her husband.
When Lady Cicely easily succeeded, late in the day, in securing the
distinction of being appointed one of the stall-keepers at a bazaar,
and the chief patroness of a conversazione in the neglected museum, in
the course of caterprises undertaken by an indefatigable eleemosynary
committee in the behalf of the local charities, Fan cheerfully worked
and catered for her ladyship’s stall, and for the sale of her packets
of tickets.
It seemed as if Oliver must be on John Hartley’s committee, the list
of whose members soon bore the bold scrawl of Harry Stanhope’s name.
The young fellow chose to write himself, with his most unyeomanlike
fist, ‘Harry Stanhope, yeoman.’ It appeared as if the Oxford-bred
miller must be dragged forward, in his own despite, to take the place
which fortune and education had given him, to ride and drive, and lunch
and speechify, here and there, in the heat of faction, with those to
whom he was really allied, so as to forget the mill and the baker’s
shop with their drudgery, and to forget along with them other shops and
their drudgeries, other shopkeepers with their aims and rewards—high
or low—of which Oliver Constable’s mind had lately been full.
It looked as if Oliver were going to comply with the irresistible
demands made upon him as a man and a citizen. He received John Hartley
with tolerable cordiality. The one man listened to the other’s private
explanations as well as to his public speeches, and, in order to do
both fairly, Oliver not only attended the meetings the candidate was
calling, but accepted his invitations to dine _en famille_ with him and
Lady Cicely. The result, which Oliver could not well avoid, was that a
considerable amount of familiarity was established between him and the
Hartleys. He was hailed as an ally by John Hartley on all occasions;
and it was Oliver’s arm which Lady Cicely took when she left her stall
at the bazaar to go to the refreshment table, and when she walked
the whole length and breadth of the town-hall in order to make her
purchases from her fellow-stall-keepers.
Fan was growing elated at the turn events were taking, and the
precedence thrust on Oliver which he could no longer escape accepting.
And if he accepted it, he must needs lose sight of his hobby and step
involuntarily, as it were, to a vantage ground from which it would
hardly be possible for him to retreat afterwards. Mr. Hartley was
the Liberal member largely upheld by the tradespeople, who not merely
approved of his principles—which, though they had never come to the
front before, were unlike his practice, and belonged to his trade
descent and trade interests—but were proud of him as a tradesman
himself. Still no doubt it was on so gigantic a scale and with such
advantages that the ordinary lineaments of his class were a good deal
effaced, and that it was out of the question for him to fraternise
with the smaller fry. He was also, through his personal antecedents,
habits and predilections, and notably through his marriage with Lady
Cicely, at one with the opposite side—supported by the great bulk of
the professional men who were apt to be more Conservative than the
Conservative county gentry and Conservative nobility to whose skirts
the professional men clung. It was no matter that John Hartley was
fighting in a political battle against Colonel Hastings, the head of
the ancient house of Hastings of Westmote and the nephew of the Marquis
of Saltmarsh.
The strife in its greatest keenness was conducted with the courtesy of
gentlemen. Between their electioneering bouts, the men met not merely
as amicable foes, but as social allies in the houses of their common
acquaintances. John Hartley and Colonel Hastings agreed to differ. They
were more than familiar with each other’s faces. They were members of
the same clubs—if not of the Reform and Carlton—of the Alpine and
Travellers’ Clubs, and Colonel Hastings was married to an old neighbour
and early friend of Lady Cicely Hartley’s.
Therefore it could not be held that Oliver Constable was necessarily
consigning himself to farther fraternity with the lower orders when he
espoused the cause of John Hartley.
But had he espoused the cause? All at once, with the thrill of a
shock—not only to Fan and the Hartleys, but to the whole Liberal
party—including the defaulter’s fellow-tradesmen, nay, to the very
Conservatives, who gave the newcomer only a half-hearted gibing
welcome, as to an erratic wavering adherent, who was not at all to be
depended upon—Oliver marched over with his single vote to the enemy.
It sounded as if he were a turncoat, it brought down upon Oliver the
indignant accusation and ugly name, though there was nothing on earth
to be gained by it, as Fan protested piteously. Oliver achieved the
climax of inconsistency by figuring as a Conservative. ‘I am not a
Conservative,’ he denied, and then added hastily, ‘but what’s in a
name? I never was and never will be a party man,’ he cried; ‘and I am
going to stand by Hastings because I think he is less of a party man
than Hartley. I don’t say that both are not honest men according to
their lights, but Hastings is either better qualified to judge for
himself, or he is more bent on acting in obedience to his judgment and
conscience. He has pledged himself to do what he can for more than one
or two measures which carry justice and righteousness on their face,
that I would to God Englishmen of all parties were manly and true
enough to unite and carry through, but which are not in the _rôle_ of
Hastings’ party any more than they are on the cards of the Liberals.
Hartley will not bring forward or second one of these bills; on the
contrary, he will throw what weight he possesses in the opposite
scale. He has said as much. He is too cautious, too Conservative at
heart—under his Liberal cloak if you will—too selfish in grasping and
not scattering—not even risking his gains, too bound to a clique to
do anything else. I don’t go in for Hastings in everything, not by a
long chalk; I am not a Conservative, but since there is only the choice
between these two, on the whole I prefer Hastings and his individual
politics, let us say, to Hartley and his general creed.’
Oliver might prefer whom he liked. He was a freeborn subject of her
Majesty, and undoubtedly he was at liberty to make his selection, but
he received little toleration and less sympathy in his withdrawal from
his party. His secession was met with a burst of reprobation. Old Dadd
called him ‘that hair-splitting fool.’ Mrs. Polley argued it was all
very well to have a mind of one’s own, but sheer refractoriness would
not sell loaves. See if Oliver Constable had not managed with his
college learning to anger his customers all round. She went in for her
own opinions, as most of her hearers knew, but for men and women in
business not to be able to keep their minds to themselves on occasions,
and behave as their best friends had a right to expect of them, which
was not to be weathercocks, and fly in the face of their associates and
supporters, was rank conceit and impertinence, little short of madness.
Not even Mr. Holland with the deacons of the chapel could pass by
Oliver’s conduct without remonstrance, seeing that it threatened
serious damage to the brilliant prosperity just dawning on the
congregation.
The chapel had been almost to a man for John Hartley. Not that he
was himself a chapel-man. As might have been supposed, the plain and
pithy, bald and homely Nonconformist worship was extremely repugnant
to him. But he had shown that he retained a reserve of his father’s
and grandfather’s sharpness in seizing an advantage, when he renewed,
in a manner, his alliance with the chapel, in anticipation of his
election. He recalled to his recollection, what he had apparently long
forgotten, that his father had been brought up a dissenter, and had
lived and died a maintainer of dissent in his own person. John Hartley
proved satisfactorily his powers of memory, by all at once bringing
out a hidden store of knowledge of dissenting annals—exceedingly
acceptable to a religious body accustomed to be, not to say slighted,
but ignored, by their brethren of the church. He betrayed a sentimental
inclination to linger over and dally with these old associations,
which served to propitiate the chapel members for his desertion of
their communion. He was not guilty of absolute misstatement when he
suffered it to be inferred that circumstances had been against him.
The difficulties of his position, the entanglements of the circle in
which he moved, especially the natural influence of Lady Cicely, had
drawn him back into the bosom of a church which was at last bestirring
itself, and testifying to the good it had got from the noble protests
of the early Puritans and the later Methodists against its periods of
latitudinarianism.
John Hartley did not pretend that he would return to the ranks of the
nonconformists, and the chapel people of Friarton were too reasonable
to expect it of a man like him. But he treated them with great respect,
almost with pensive tenderness. He called upon Mr. Holland and
mentioned in conversation that his father had sat under the profitable
ministry of an able and pious grand-uncle of the Friarton pastor’s.
John Hartley requested to be taken into the chapel on a week-day,
though it did not seem to occur to him to attend the Wednesday lecture
or the Friday prayer-meeting, and then asked humbly if he might be
permitted to present new, more efficient, and ornamental chandeliers,
to help to shed material light on the congregation—a request which was
handsomely granted.
Lady Cicely called on Mrs. Holland, and begged the shape of her baby’s
pinafore, thus showing that, though Lady Cicely was by every inherited
affinity a churchwoman, she was, nevertheless, so far leavened by her
husband’s purer ecclesiastical origin, as not to suspect contamination
lurking in a dissenting baby’s bib and frills. The result was that the
chapel people—from Mr. Holland to Jack Dadd—were strongly in favour
of John Hartley, to the extent of considering him in part their own
property and candidate. For though he had not promised to procure the
disestablishment of the church, he had engaged to remain neutral on
the Burials Bill, while Colonel Hastings was openly antagonistic to
dissenting prayers prayed by a dissenting clergyman, over a dissenter’s
corpse in a parish churchyard. And the chapel constituents were assured
they would procure yet better terms from their member. They began
to grow rashly secure of his good offices and to plume themselves
beforehand on the distinction that was awaiting them.
Oliver’s fresh secession was therefore not only an affront to his
co-religionists, they were driven to reckon him guilty of uncalled-for
schism and lukewarm treachery, where the interests of the chapel
were concerned. For unluckily, his example affected others—only
a contemptible few, no doubt—malcontents, jealous of the leading
deacons and the larger contributors, such as were to be found in every
congregation, discontented Adullamites, the breath of whose nostrils
was mischief. These were mostly men among the poorer members of no
repute, who had failed in business, who had erred in their religious
profession and moral practice, persons who did little credit to Oliver
Constable as his followers, on whom he probably did not count, as he
did not encourage their adherence. But he made them prominent to the
disgust of the rest of the congregation. He instigated them, whether
he meant it or not, when they would otherwise have wrangled aimlessly,
to show that ‘the connection’ was divided, to make a definite
demonstration, which, however small, was a scandal in the eyes of the
magnates of the chapel, for Colonel Hastings.
There were meetings official and unofficial in the chapel vestry and in
members’ houses, that the congregation might discuss among themselves
the question of Oliver Constable’s delinquency. There were loud and
long whisperings about him as not only disaffected, but as a young
fellow of dangerous license of opinion, who would in all likelihood
end in rationalism and free-thinking. ’Liza Polley regarded him, in
horrified fascination, as a dreadful young genius, who, in his pride
of unsanctified intellect, dared to defy Mr. Holland and Mr. Dadd. Yet
she had never heard such naughty words as Jack Dadd would let fall
sometimes, drop from Oliver’s mouth. He was a regular and reverent
worshipper at the chapel. Nobody had ever seen him ‘screwed’ or so
much as half screwed, though he kept company on occasions with the
young shopkeepers of the town. He was understood to be domestic in
his habits. He was known to consider the poor with even an excess of
liberality, while he sought to do it without observation. ’Liza had
heard him laughed at for the absurd rigidity of his scruples in the
conduct of his business. But she feared it would be all the worse
for Oliver, if he turned out, after all, to be little better than an
atheist, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Surely nobody would think him
‘a great catch’ now. The fact that his suit to her had come to nothing,
was like one of those deliverances—of which one reads in good books.
Oliver was not left in partial ignorance of the ordeal through which he
was passing. Notably the minister, and next to him one qualified member
after another, were appointed to deal with the offender. Oliver found
the minister the least arrogant and intolerant of his inquisitors.
But even Mr. Holland could not see what Oliver thought he saw of the
comparative insignificance of the burial of the dead to the welfare
of the living. Mr. Holland looked as if he too considered Oliver’s
citation of the injunction, ‘let the dead bury their dead,’ misapplied,
as Fan had judged his quotation of other maxims which she did not
propose to treat as of no weight in themselves. Mr. Holland talked of
institutions and organisations, signs and precedents, of the urgent
necessity for unity among brethren, of preserving the peace of the
congregation, of making everything give place to the great interests
of nonconformity in England, of the compulsion laid upon men that they
should work with the tools which Providence had put into their hands.
But here Oliver was as obdurate and slow of comprehension as his pastor
could be on the respective claims of the dead and the living.
‘Right and wrong can never undergo change or modification,’ protested
Oliver hotly. ‘I was a man before I was a Christian. I am a Christian
just because I am convinced Christianity is the one sheet anchor and
lever for humanity. I was and am a Christian before I ever will be a
Nonconformist.’
The result was that Oliver found himself isolated and ostracised,
viewed as a contumacious chapel member, suffered of course to continue
among the loyal members, because there was no formula by which he could
be expelled on such grounds, but no longer trusted and approved of; so
far from it, he was in the meantime an object of reprobation to the
greater number of his brethren.
Perhaps it could not be helped, perhaps he partly deserved his
condemnation. For Oliver was not altogether clear in his judgment and
conscience where nonconformity was concerned. He was by constitution a
many-sided man, prone to eclecticism on most subjects, except, indeed,
on what were to him the eternal verities of right and wrong in life,
and in a divinely ordained religion. He must always be more or less at
variance with men who were never divided in their minds on the merits
of all other questions which, to Oliver Constable, were, to say the
least, open to discussion.
He had read and seen a good deal on both sides of English
ecclesiastical history. He had sympathies with both. His heroes stood
ranked under opposing banners. He gave in his adherence to Jeremy
Taylor and Bishop Butler and Samuel Wilberforce, as well as to Richard
Baxter and John Wesley and Robert Hall.
But Oliver had been brought up a nonconformist. He had gone with his
father to the chapel, while Fan had gone with her mother to the church.
There had been no necessary strife in the family on this account.
Peter Constable, though a man of inferior abilities to his son,
had possessed some mental features in common with Oliver. Peter
had respected his wife’s form of faith as she had respected his.
Occasionally he had joined in her service and she had joined in his,
but in proportion as there was no rancorous war of creeds, there
had been no proselytism. To Oliver the chapel was the church of his
fathers, and of his section of the community. He was perfectly sensible
of the defects of its system, but he was far from prepared to grant
that the merits did not exceed the defects, and still less that the
defects of dissenters were more ruinous than the shortcomings of
churchmen.
Under this impression, Oliver held it disloyal to abandon the chapel,
any more than the class to which he belonged. At the same time he had
his doubts and scruples. But just as he was a man of much stronger
imagination and capacity for idealisation than John Hartley was,
Oliver did not feel offended by the bareness and ruggedness of the
ecclesiastical ways he trod. He saw beyond them, even as he saw beyond
the modern smoothness and smartness of the chapel building, back into
what struck him as the less objectionable gauntness and grimness of
its predecessor in which earnest and fervent men had worshipped,
often to the peril and loss of their earthly joys and worldly goods.
There were records in existence which proved that the chapel had been
among the earliest of its kind in England. When Oliver thought that
contemporaries and allies of John Milton and John Bunyan, Oliver
Cromwell, Blake and Daniel Defoe—who, it seems, has been convicted of
time-serving and double-dealing, but who was so stout and unflinching a
patriot withal, that one may be tempted to prefer Defoe’s shuffling to
some later men’s consistency—Oliver Constable laughed at the idea of
men of narrow and uncultured intellect and vulgar bumptiousness being
the sole figures that peopled the region in which he had come to sit
apart, conscious that he was looked upon as an interloper and false
friend, unworthy of the right hand of fellowship, or of the confidence
of his companions.
John Hartley won the election mainly by the support of the
dissenters—whom, however, success did not at once soften to the
renegade.
CHAPTER XXI.
MUTINY IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE.
Oliver was a little liable to look over the heads of his subordinates
as well as his equals, to be possessed by his purpose instead of
possessing it, and to follow it out—having no attention to spare for
the signs of the times, though he was particularly calculated to call
them forth in hostile array, and they were certain to count largely in
the result. It took Oliver by surprise when he was met by the ‘poser’
which he might reasonably have expected, of resistance and anarchy in
his own dominions, where he had been seeking to enact transcendental
laws and attempting to carry out, not political or social, but moral
economy—not every man for himself alone, but every man for his
neighbour still more, ‘in honour preferring one another,’ which Oliver
persisted in regarding as the only worthy and enduring trade principles.
There had been growls of dissatisfaction, sneers of scepticism, tacit
defiance in the mill and the bakehouse, which had all passed unheeded
by Oliver, before the storm broke forth. It began with a comparatively
trifling _émeute_ in the mill after the miller’s men had been comparing
notes with the journeymen bakers who went far before the grinders of
the raw grain in crude, shallow quickness of reasoning and one-sided,
undigested knowledge. The journeymen bakers first crammed the young
millers with the rank growth of their supposed grievances, and then
adroitly pushed the crammed men before them, into the breach, to open
the battle with Oliver their common enemy.
There were long-standing usages and privileges in the miller and
baker trades which Oliver had thought fit to abolish without asking
the consent of his servants farther than in the address which he
delivered on entering into possession of the mill and the shop, and
that lay beyond the comprehension of the cleverest man among them,
who immediately made up his mind that it was all ‘soft sawder’ and
‘book-learning bosh.’ The men chose to regard these time-out-of-mind
customs and liberties, though they had no direct bearing on any
miller’s or baker’s prosperity, and were even sometimes prejudicial to
fair play among the men themselves, as their rules to which they had
agreed on entering their trades. No master had any right to interfere
with and overturn these rules without the men’s concurrence; above
all, they were not such fools as to be defrauded of them by a fine
assumption of philanthropy on the part of their antagonist.
Oliver discovered that there had been disobedience and evasion of
a regulation which he had laid down at the Mill, that two different
qualities of grain, whether coming from the same or different owners,
should not from that time forward be so taken and ground together as to
produce a spurious average of quality, even when that average might be
accepted with ignorant or indifferent acquiescence in the case of the
better as well as the worse wheat.
‘Why did you not attend to what I said, Green?’ enquired Oliver
angrily. ‘Mind that this lumping together does not occur again. At
the best it is a slovenly, inaccurate makeshift for clean, correct
work, which prevents a proper estimate of each quality of grain and
adulterates flour at the mill; at the worst it is an imposition and
a cheat, hiding careless negligence on our part, or consenting to
withdraw the surplus fineness and cleanness of one man’s growth of corn
in order to add it to the deficient worth of another man’s crop. I will
not have it.’
‘It were a saving of trouble as nobody objected to, instead of a wexing
petikularity,’ said Ned, startling Oliver by speaking again, and that
with such fluency as to render it suspicious whether the fluency,
together with the bluster, could proceed originally from monosyllabic,
stolid Ned. ‘It were always done afore my day, and I dunnot see why it
shouldn’t be done no longer. I can tell you Maine, as owns the best
stuff, wunnot thank you for turning it out bolted that white it might
be furrin flour. Nobody will believe it native, though he take his
Bible oath on it. Every customer will swear it’s ’Mericain and has come
over in casks, and will sour afore you can say “Jack Robinson.” And
Wade, he wunnot own his stuff, as you’d make it come out, in the course
of nature and machinery. He’ll swear it’s been tampered with, and no
wonder, since he’ll not find a buyer for it on this side of Lon’on.
He’ll be forced to mix what might have been food for men in his horse
and cattle’s mashes, or to fling it to his cocks and hens. Friarton
Mill will have seen the last of his custom,’ ended Ned sardonically.
‘Never mind that, it is my business; do what I bid you.’
‘And the trouble of stowing away the emptyings of the sacks separate,
and of setting and keeping the mill a-going for two bouts, which need
only have been one, will be your business too?’ said Ned, like all
willing learners going considerably beyond the bounds of his lesson and
converting bluster into insolence. ‘It is a fine gentleman scholard’s
nonsense, which is downright oonreasonable as well. Dang it, I’ll have
nowt to do with it,’ protested Ned, flinging down a spade which he had
in his hand with a noisy clatter.
‘Leave it alone then, my man, and come to me at the office for your
wages,’ said Oliver, walking away.
Green did not resume his work that afternoon, neither did the other
men and lads. The mill stood, without anything wrong about the gear
which had in these modern times rendered a lack of water a deficiency
to be coped with. Oliver missed its accustomed hum and splash, while
‘the merry millers,’ merry no longer, hung about and consulted
together, sulky and stubborn-looking.
But next day the premature shabby strike somehow collapsed. Its
promoters, including Green, chopfallen and taciturn as of old, were at
their duties again, to which Oliver suffered them to return without
farther words.
It was otherwise in the bake-shop. There the mutiny was systematised
and ripe, and though it did not carry the whole establishment with it,
it cost Oliver his manager, some of his best hands, and more than it
seemed possible for him to recover from.
Jim Hull came to Oliver one day in the back parlour. Speak of the great
Napoleon’s features resembling a finely cut cameo, Jim Hull’s nose,
mouth, and chin were quite as hard, clear and set when he refused every
parley or overture of good-fellowship in the shape of refreshment, and
put it to his master point-blank: ‘Do you continue of the same mind,
Master Oliver, that no alum, nor no other harmless stuff for whitening
the bread, be used in the bakehouse, and that all sorts of fancy bread,
down to them rolls, be weighed and sold by the pound, like the reg’lar
loaf?’
‘I do, Jim,’ said Oliver concisely.
‘Have you taken it into consideration, sir,’ went on Jim solemnly,
‘that customers as are used to white bread and don’t want brown won’t
buy bread which, though it may be made of first-rate flour, looks as if
it were compounded of ’alf and ’alf. There’s a deal in the look of a
thing in all trades,’ said Jim almost wistfully, ‘and folk is fanciful,
and is guided by the look as well as by the taste. Nay, the taste gets
trained to prefer what it has been accustomed to. There’s a many will
have pepper-dust rather than pepper, and chicory before coffee.’
‘And bread either flavourless or with a suspicion of sourness or
bitterness instead of sweet bread, eh, Jim?’ chimed in Oliver. ‘Then
tastes must be reclaimed from their vitiated state for the sake of the
tasters, that’s all. I have not become a baker to sell adulterated
bread of dubious weight, even if the adulteration were innocent and the
weight in favour of the buyer. I mean to sell pure bread, by an exact
measure.’
‘Bread has always been divided into two classes,’ remonstrated Jim,
growing stiff and stern again: ‘the plain and the fancy. The plain has
been measured by weight, the fancy——’
‘By fancy,’ interrupted Oliver. ‘But you are aware, Jim, that if any
buyer choose to buy, by the pound, cottage loaves which, no less
than rolls, go under the head of fancy bread, the baker is bound
to sell them by weight, though I do not suppose he can be fined for
apportioning them according to fancy if there is no demand to the
contrary.’
‘It ain’t the custom,’ said Jim testily. ‘I crave your pardon, sir, but
to put it in that way is to insult an honest man as would not offer
less than the bulk of an article for its money’s worth, not though you
paid him for doing it in golden guineas. Have you ever thought of that,
Master Oliver, of the slur you are ready to cast on other bakers—on
your own father, for instance, that always did as he would be done by,
and on all as worked under him in responsible situations?’
Oliver flushed. ‘There is no reason to look at the change in that
light, Jim,’ he said earnestly. ‘I know my father was an honest
man. There is no piece of knowledge I possess which I would be more
unwilling to give up. I have never for a moment suspected your
integrity—I would as soon question my own. But every man must act
according to his individual light. These practices we are talking
about are objectionable and can easily be rendered dishonest. At least
everybody should know the nature and amount of breadstuff, like any
other stuff, that he gets for his money, though I don’t say he is
cheated if he knowingly and willingly takes an artificially bleached,
roughly calculated purchase, several ounces under or over the mark, for
the look or the fashion of it. The worst is that few people know what
they are about in such transactions.’
‘Well, all I have to say, Master Oliver,’ said Jim doggedly, ‘these are
a deal too fine distinctions for me. I cannot consent to be treated
like a man as has long been a party, in the capacity of foreman, to
defrauding the public of their due—me as never tampered with light
weights, which your father would have been the last to even either me
or hisself to—not in our whole lives. I tell you, sir, it is putting
shame on us both, and on a respectable trade, for you to sport them
whims and fads in carrying it on at this time of day. Nobody will thank
you for it, and as for your dark-coloured, home-tasted bread, nobody
will like it or buy it. You’ll soon throw to the dogs as fine a baking
business as was ever worked up in more than one generation.’
‘I can’t help that,’ said Oliver inflexibly. ‘If the townspeople are
fools and pin their faith to mock instead of to real merits, it shall
be in spite of me and not because of me.’
‘Then, Master Oliver, it’s right I should speak out. My nephew ’Arry,
as was ready, with a little help, to buy the old business if it had
come into the market, will begin in Friarton, on his own account, this
here Michaelmas. He has axed me to jine him. And why shouldn’t I? I
would not have deserted the old concern if I could have been of any
use. But it seems my experience was all wrong. I’m too old a cock to
begin afresh. Besides, I’m free to tell you the mode followed by a
young gentleman as knows nothing of trade save out of books, and is,
if he will pardon me for mentioning it, a rank enthusiast, will be all
downhill and no mistake. I cannot stop you, Master Oliver; you refuse
to be guided by me, so I must wash my hands of you, and jine my nephew
’Arry, to whom I can do a good turn, though it goes sore against the
grain if you’ll believe me, sir, to start an opposition to Constable’s
business, as I helped to make flourish, and which was the pride of my
’eart, years before you came into the world, Master Oliver.’ As Jim
ended a slight quiver passed over his compact features.
‘I believe you, Jim,’ said Oliver gravely, ‘and I, for my part, am so
sorry to lose you that you may guess how much the principles are to me
which compel such a sacrifice.’
Jim shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
Constable’s baking business without Jim Hull was sure to be crippled
for a time, but there were other kinds of crippling going on, and a
worse mess for Oliver to get into.
Oliver, in his consciousness of his own shortcomings, and his passion
for independence and individuality, was not so much inclined to insist
on punctuality and method in his subordinates as most new brooms show
themselves. But he happened to remark that what rules and penalties
were imposed, had gradually come to be inflicted chiefly on the younger
journeymen and apprentices. The elder and more skilled bakers took
upon them, in the right of their value to Oliver and the difficulty of
replacing them on an emergency, to infringe the orders and do their
work earlier or later, faster or slower, according to their convenience
and inclination, putting about and causing some slight injury to
the subordinates, and creating a certain amount of disorder in the
establishment. In place of these experts presenting a good example to
their juniors, the latter were stimulated in the reverse direction, and
prompted to acquire such qualities as might enable them in their turn
to shirk obligations and throw the weight of drudgery and discipline on
their weaker, more untrained fellows.
Oliver was determined this should not be. He heard that the baker
Webster was conspicuous at this game, that he rarely kept his time,
that he compressed his kneading into the briefest operation compatible
with success, that he set his sponge at the latest date, and was guilty
of the same recklessness in placing his batch in the oven, so that he
imperilled his whole night and morning’s work, though he might escape
by the skin of the teeth from reducing it—either to a sodden mass or a
cinder, as the oven fire served.
Webster was a man given over to a variety of conflicting interests and
distractions, rather than the victim of one vice; he was unsettled more
than dissipated, still he appeared in the bakehouse occasionally the
worse for drink.
Oliver set himself to convict his servant—in name, in one of his
misdemeanours, and going into the bakehouse early one morning when the
bakers were about to subject the risen dough to the second kneading,
he found Webster’s place vacant; a friend had contrived to go through
the first process for Webster’s batch as well as for his own, but was
halting ere he proceeded to complete the performance. Oliver remarked
aloud that Webster was absent from his work, and ordered that his
batch should be worked up and put into the oven, without waiting for
his arrival or asking his permission, while Jim Hull, who was still in
office, should challenge the defender for non-attendance.
But this quick catching up of Webster for neglect of duty was quite
another affair from the neighbourly help which connived at and
concealed his delinquencies. And Jim Hull looked aggrieved in his own
person and worried by Oliver’s interference. ‘It ain’t any good,’ he
said in an undertone to Oliver. ‘Webster won’t be put upon, he’ll take
his way, but it’s a fact he’ll get more dough through his hands, to
better purpose, in ten minutes than the other lads will in twenty.’
‘All the same he’ll not put upon me and the rest of the men, as I take
it he does. Who made him an exception to the rest? Put upon indeed!
I should like to know who is in danger of being put upon. Jim Hull,
you are getting soft in your old age. Let some of these fellows do
Webster’s job,’ said Oliver angrily.
‘The’ve got their own jobs, and some of them is hard enough pushed to
turn out presentable batches for themselves. I tell you it ain’t every
man can take Webster’s place. That there batch of his is for Dr.
Riley’s family. The doctor is difficult to please in his bread, and he
sets on some of his patients to be as cranky as hisself,’ grumbled Jim.
‘I’m sorry for Riley and his patients then,’ said Oliver shortly. ‘Is
there no baker here,’ Oliver raised his voice slightly so as to be
heard by more than Jim, ‘who can knead Webster’s stuff in addition to
his own?’
No man spoke. Each felt scrupulous as to the kneading which was
necessary for his batch this morning. Clearly the movement to call
Webster to order was not popular, even though it arose from his own
fault, and that a fault which only a sprinkling of the men present
would have presumed to commit.
Jim Hull began slowly to strip the jacket from his rheumatic shoulders
in the hot steaming air. As he did so he repeated still more surlily,
‘It ain’t every man can take Webster’s place. Baking itself ain’t a
trade which a young fellow can pick up at his feet any day, anyhow,
and read the rights and wrongs of it straight off—by heart, like a
printed page, then give his orders conformable.’
‘Hold on, Jim.’ Oliver stopped his foreman’s preparations. ‘I suppose
you think I’ve forgotten any lessons I ever learnt. And as for those
fellows yonder,’ pointing to the row of figures at the baking-boards,
‘who are grinning behind their shirt-sleeves and their heads powdered
like flunkeys—they are a set of flunkeys to Webster or any ringleader
who chooses to hold the asses by the ears of their class prejudices and
petty vices— they believe I’m speaking of what I know nothing about,
or that I set them to do a task which I hold to be a degradation,
therefore I am dependent on their skill and fidelity—Heaven help me!
and if I were famishing I should perish for lack of bread without their
assistance. You and they are mightily mistaken though, Jim.’
CHAPTER XXII.
A REFORMER’S REWARD.
Oliver suited the action to the word, flung off his coat, bared his
long sinewy arms to the shoulders, advanced to the vacant board, and
laid hold of the dough fast becoming flat and unprofitable. In spite
of his passion he felt shy and awkward under the consciousness of
the adverse, critical eyes glancing at him, some of them in sheer
amazement, some of them in jealous resentment, some of them in sly
amusement, and only a very few of them in dubious generous approbation.
He distrusted his qualifications with reason. But when was he not
awkward? and it was surely possible for a man of his muscle and
modicum of experience to knead dough into a passable condition and
dispose of it in an oven.
As Oliver solemnly pounded at his lump of dough, he was assailed
mentally by successive trains of thought, contradictory, sympathetic,
purely humorous.
In the first place he was angrily sensible of the same momentary rush
of shamefacedness, in trying to bake before his bakers, that he had
felt in first standing in his shop-door before his fellow-townsmen—yet
what was there in this fine, white flour, powdering him and his
companions alike, to stain a man with so disgraceful a stain that in
the case of poor Neaves, the very reflection of it caused the weak
undergraduate to leap into the Isis in order to wash out the blot and
his miserable life with it? Was the mark so much more invidious than
the soil which Neaves’s quondam companions had been fain enough to
contract from the earth of hunting fields, or the soil of stables and
kennels, or the mire of race-courses, or even the smoke and blood of
a battle-field—to pass through which without ‘falling into a funk,’
if the chance came his way, without any deed of his, constituted every
young man a hero?
Why should the mere inference of having to do with wheat as it was made
into bread to feed the multitudes, operate more violently upon men’s
stupid, snobbish prejudices than the report of being mixed up with
barley in the course of becoming malt, or with hops as they passed into
ale—to form refreshment for the thirsty, no doubt? But the refreshment
was decidedly open to abuse when the great distillers and brewers might
also be the great licensed victuallers, the invisible, irresponsible
landlords of scores and hundreds of gin-palaces and ale-houses, as well
as the builders of churches and founders of schools.
Oliver had a fleeting vision of Mrs. Hilliard’s cool, fresh
drawing-room in contrast to the hot vapour-laden bakehouse, with
Catherine Hilliard bidding men fight or die, or speak and witness for
the truth—but never mix flour, yeast and salt, and convert leaven into
wholesome bread, to fill the mouths and recruit the strength of hungry,
fainting creatures.
Oliver saw Harry Stanhope standing without his coat, bareheaded, on
his half-laden cart, ‘forking’ his sheaves of corn, and knew that was
one thing in the estimation of the world and kneading dough was quite
another. There was as great a difference between them as that between
a bar of iron and a twopenny nail. Yet Oliver remembered the American
philosopher Thoreau, and his delight in the sign of self-sufficing
independence which he recognised in the act of baking his own bread.
What a manly, ay, a kingly work Thoreau had made of it, as historians
and poets had dealt with the picturesque initiatory steps taken by
Cincinnatus when the patriot returned from saving his country in the
ranks of war, to plough, and reap, and gather in the fruits of his own
peaceful fields.
Thoreau baked for his own hand, at his own will and pleasure. He was
a republican of republicans—to whom not only courts and thrones were
repugnant, but who, while he had no quarrel with his kind, sought to
know the feelings of a wild man—alone with the marvellous hordes of
lower animals whom he understood and loved, and who repaid him with
their trust—alone with Nature as she came from the hands of her Maker.
Thus Thoreau had steeped his rough bread-making in reflections which
had lent it a hue at once primitive and solemn.
There was another man dubbed a baker, whether he would or not,
nicknamed in wanton mockery because he could not furnish bread for his
famished people; a shy, shrinking man, not altogether without the
dignity of the line of a hundred kings—of St. Louis himself, blended
with the native dignity of innocent intentions in the midst of his
weakness, and with the pathos of a martyr for the sins of his fathers
and evil advisers, as he stood forward in the window of his palace,
wearing the red cap of anarchy for the crown of sovereignty, while
France heard him hailed, not as the monarch—not as ‘Louis le Desiré,’
but as ‘Louis Capet, the Baker.’
There was still another figure engaged in the homely occupation that
rose up then in the Friarton bakehouse. He had been introduced to
Oliver and to thousands more in the president’s speech at the close
of one of the Royal Society’s meetings. Oliver was not intimately
acquainted with the man, as the hero when he had passed from this world
was happily to be rendered familiar to the whole reading public. But
the miller and baker of Friarton—a distinct specimen of his kind—had
got from the president’s speech a general idea of that other master
baker, and rejoiced and gloried in him.
Oliver did not himself possess genius, yet he had some of its wide
sympathies, keen intuitions and susceptibilities, and strong beliefs.
Had the less gifted man known the greater Oliver would have prized
highly the manly self-respect and modesty, even the odd gruff bearing,
which was only the prickly husk to the sweet kernel with its milk of
human kindness and juice of a fine, genial humour, which no general
misconception, no bitter adversity, could sour. Oliver would have
gone a pilgrimage—for he, too, had his boundless enthusiasm—to that
obscure little northern bakehouse, where an intellectual and moral
giant toiled single-handed and fared frugally amidst his inspired
drawings of cherubim and seraphim, ape and Greek boy. Oliver Constable
could not have pretended to match his brother-tradesman’s profound,
patient studies in natural science, or the royal bounty which disposed
of the geological and botanical specimens—so painfully, and yet with
such deep satisfaction and noble exultation, chiselled from the rock
and plucked from the moor. After they had been laboriously and lovingly
assorted and preserved, these specimens, together with the deductions
carefully and warily drawn from them, were lavished with princely
liberality on men of science, for whom they might win name and fame,
while the real conqueror of the spoils was content to remain ‘Dick the
Baker,’ drudging at a trade which was unremunerative to him, unknown
and unhonoured, so far as the mere tinsel of worldly distinction and
applause was concerned. And through it all Dick, who was the reverse
of a morbid, fantastic misanthropist, would have preferred a certain
amount of material prosperity to the slow poverty which ground him to
death at last, with the honest human fear of debt and starvation. He
would have liked in his early manhood to have met with such a degree
of comprehension and fellow-feeling from his neighbours as might have
saved him from being quickly driven back on his natural reserve,
with his huge stores of kindliness, cheeriness, and wit, confined to
the kindred at a distance from him, his one or two rarely endowed,
occasional cronies, his simple old housekeeper, the young students
who were welcome to his priceless instructions without a thought of a
professor’s fee. But in the man’s lofty soul and poetic idealisation,
which could exist along with exact knowledge, he was content, with
something like scorn of being pointed out for any other distinction,
to be known only—apart from a queer fish, and a half-cracked dour
sinner—for what he still was, without prejudice or false shame, ‘Dick
the Baker.’
There would have been a greater charm in the man for Oliver than what
belonged to the simplicity and gladness which took every circumstance
of his lot bravely and thankfully, singing over his baking trough,
singing back to the roar of the waves of the Northern sea. His
heartily admiring biographer has recorded Dick’s honest practice as
a tradesman:—‘His quarter loaf always contained four pounds full,
while the two-pound loaves of many of the other bakers were short by
about four ounces. Cheating had the advantage over honesty of six per
cent. on every loaf—a profit in itself, few weighing their bread and
deducting the deficiency.’
At last Oliver’s mind rambled off to a comical recollection of his
grandfather, the first Oliver Constable, miller and baker, of whom
his grandson had very authentic information, in addition to a faint
personal recollection. This Oliver had been enterprising and ambitious
as any founder of a race. He had gone from a country bakehouse to
London, and served for a term there, in order to be taught what might
be the metropolitan mysteries and perfections of the trade. He had
certainly attained the power of concocting a certain pudding, which was
long held in high estimation in Friarton. The old Oliver, his wife,
children, and kindred a little farther removed, had piqued themselves
on this acquirement, and in order to keep it a private inheritance, had
shrouded it in a captivating secresy. Even in family conclave, when
there was an annual friendly gathering and festival in the baker’s
house each Christmas, and when the supper was crowned with this very
London pudding, as a fitting compliment from the host to his guests,
the rites of the piece of cookery were conducted not only with peculiar
ceremony, but with closed doors. In the course of the evening, the
hostess, having retired and seen that a collection of the necessary
materials—eggs, butter, milk, flour, fruit, and spices, was complete,
and without flaw, ranged in her own back kitchen, returned to the
company, and asked her husband with brief significance, ‘Goodman, are
you ready?’
The head of the house—a man of solid gravity both of body and
mind—then withdrew with quiet importance from the circle of his
friends for the space of half-an-hour. The prevailing standard of
manners exacted that nobody should remark on the retirement of the
entertainer for the good of the entertained, though it was fully
comprehended that he had thrown off his company coat, donned his
professional apron, and was then whisking eggs and beating butter in
solitude, as the highest proof of his hospitality. The result figured
at the banquet, and then all tongues were loosed in praise of the dish
and its maker.
Why not? Perhaps old Oliver Constable’s exercise of his professional
skill in the middle of his season of recreation, was a greater
sacrifice to friendship, and not more of an act of vanity, than is the
preparation of a salad or a sauce by the amateur hands of a modern host
or hostess.
As Oliver shook off the flour, and put on his coat again, Webster
lounged into the bakehouse, and stopped short, bewildered, staring hard
at the empty board and the baker who had just quitted it.
‘Webster, it is not in the fitting order of things that I should be
under the necessity of doing your work,’ said Oliver, whose temper had
got time to cool; ‘I have warned you before, and you have paid no heed.
The connection between us had better come to an end. I give you your
leave.’
‘As you please, sir; from this moment if you like,’ said Webster
jauntily.
‘Very well. I take you at your word,’ said his master.
Oliver was inclined to make an example—if it can be called an example
among servants, whose turn has come to carry matters with a high hand,
and dictate terms to their masters. Let us hope that the new masters
will be magnanimous, and not abuse their power, to a still greater
extent than was done by the old, else the present dead-lock would never
have arisen.
But Oliver was not aware—whether or not the knowledge might have
swayed him—of the combination of circumstances which rendered
Webster’s dismissal a severe blow to the man, in spite of his bravado,
at a crisis in his affairs. The restless, factious baker had been
keeping company with a girl slightly above him in station, whose
relations, especially her father—a thriving master-builder, of
punctilious and conservative views—did not by any means admire in
his prospective son-in-law the hectoring tone, and the free and easy
ways, which, along with considerable force of will and cleverness at
his trade, as at other things, had secured for Webster an ascendency
among the other journeymen bakers, who were characterised for the most
part by greater pliability and less ability. The principal score in
Webster’s favour was his remaining in Mr. Constable’s service. It was
this which kept Webster from being rejected with unhesitating severity
by Keys the builder, and as an inevitable consequence of the summary
dismissal, with tender regret, by pretty, gentle, Nelly Keys. For
though Nelly had been greatly taken with her lover’s lordly swagger,
she was too good a girl, and too dutiful a daughter, to act in direct
disobedience to her father.
When Webster got his leave from Oliver, he knew it was all up with him
and Nelly, to whom he was attached with the peculiar vehemence and
self-assertion of his nature, though he put the best face on what he
regarded as a misfortune, if not a wrong, and braved it out at the
first brush in the bakehouse.
And sure enough, Keys told Webster on the afternoon of the same day
to keep the outside of the master-builder’s door for the rest of the
journeyman baker’s stay at Friarton. The said master-builder had seized
the opportunity of the first rumour of Webster’s quarrel with Mr.
Constable to rescue his daughter from a future husband who had shown
himself a breeder of mischief and instigator to rebellion, and was
likely to end a noisy idle demagogue, a rolling stone that would gather
no moss.
After trying in vain to soften the father, and next to obtain a private
interview with the weeping Nelly, in order to drag from her a promise
to stand by her lover, against her father and the whole world, Webster
took refuge in a Friarton gin-palace, and continued there so long as
to do still more deadly injury to his cause. He was seen towards
nightfall, in Friarton streets, drunk and disorderly, a long step for a
tradesman who has hitherto been decorous in his cups, and who has not
‘gone on the spree’ like any shameless reprobate.
Another day intervened, during which Webster went here and there,
unable, in spite of his boasted powers, to secure a second engagement
in Friarton or its neighbourhood. Instead of getting rid of the fumes
of rage and drink, he contracted still denser fumes of a similar
description. As ill luck would have it, on the evening of the second
day, when the man, always headstrong and violent, and now half-beside
himself with disappointment, mortification, and Dutch courage, was on
his way to the village at which Jim Hull’s nephew still kept together
his country connection, Webster’s path took him past Friarton Mill, and
at some hundred yards’ distance from the house, he encountered his
late master, taking a stroll in the autumn dusk, with his hands in his
pockets and his pipe in his mouth.
Oliver was about to pass by his discarded baker with a brief ‘Good
evening,’ when Webster brushed up against him, and delivered himself of
a sneering, stammering proposal: ‘Let us have a little of your company,
Mister Constable—take a walk together—not out of the way when you
don’t object to fill my place in the bakehouse.’
Oliver saw the state the man was in, and sought to be quit of him
without an unpleasant scene. ‘No; the arrangement would be rather
different,’ he said coolly; ‘but I have no mind to discuss it. Get out
of my road, man, or it will be the worse for you.’
The last sentence was provoked by Webster’s stumbling right across
Oliver’s path, and standing unsteadily barring his farther progress.
‘So, Mister Constable, it was enough to meddle with my baking, and
bully, and make short work of me, though you have not a word to say to
me for the wrong done me—not a word as from man to man, when we meet
like equals. Anyhow, the meeting-place is on a road as is free to both
of us, and under the dark night which is going to come down, and cover
both of us—and what one of us may choose to do to settle the question
between us,’ said Webster incoherently and grandiloquently.
‘What should I have to say to you?’ demanded Oliver. ‘You broke faith
as a servant, you were not in the bakehouse when it was your duty to me
and the other men that you should be there. I simply did my duty as a
master in turning you adrift, not without repeated notice beforehand of
what must happen.’
Webster was not open to reason. He was brutal with unrestrained passion
and distraught with strong drink. He shouted the lie direct to Oliver,
following the accusation of falsehood with a fierce curse and a furious
blow.
Such things happen still, occasionally, in England, in spite of
civilisation, propriety, and the rural police.
Oliver could have best parried the blow by a counter-blow, which,
directed by a strong, steady, not untrained hand, would have laid the
reeling assailant at the assailed man’s feet. But he had an objection
to this aggressive mode of self-defence in which he was certain to come
off conqueror, and in trying merely to parry the violent lunge made at
him, Oliver entangled his long legs with those of his enemy, swerved,
swayed, and fell, somewhat ignominiously, to the ground.
Webster, notwithstanding his half-furious, half-dazed malice, was still
so much the creature of order, and of a peaceful if bragging past, as
to take no advantage of Oliver’s lying prone at the man’s feet and at
his mercy for one decisive minute—the next, Webster uttered a crow of
triumph, administered a not unnatural, but most unchivalrous kick to
the shins of the antagonist struggling on his feet again, and meandered
away in the gathering darkness.
Oliver stood wincing with pain, pulling himself together, and
not believing his senses till he was forced to laugh at his own
incredulity. He might have given chase to the fellow in the heat of the
fray, since Oliver imagined any damage which he had received would have
yielded, for the moment, to the fighting cock in him, while it ought
to have been about matched by the enemy which Webster had put into his
mouth, to steal away his brains and the right use of his legs.
Oliver could, with still greater ease, have called aloud, and reckoned
with security on his call being heard as far as Ned Green’s and the
other millers’ cottages, bringing him instant assistance, which Oliver
did not believe would have been withheld because of the disaffection
common both to the mill and the bakehouse. Webster’s outrage had
been too gross and included the chance of turning the tables, and
effectually scaring many of the conspirators.
As it was, Oliver did neither. He laughed again, a little
constrainedly, for that kick on his shins, though he had been
accustomed to be mauled at football, and though this was almost a
playful kick administered in the delirious inconstancy of Webster’s
mind, had done its work with considerable effect.
After his short laugh Oliver began to reflect. ‘I must have hurt the
rascal on some tender spot to reduce him to such excess of drink and
madness in a couple of days. I gave credit to his pretensions and to
Jim Hull’s dogmatic assurance that Webster would find another master
sooner than I should another servant. Well, there’s nothing to be done
at this time of the day. It is utterly impossible now for him to make
submission and agree to my terms, or for me to reinstate him in the
bakehouse, but we may be no more than quits, although he should have
contrived to crack my ankle-bone. How shall I manage to hop home,
though Fan accuses me of a propensity to stand on one leg? And what am
I to say to Fan and the world at large? A fall? It was a fall, but a
jolly rum fall to produce such consequences.’
Yet Oliver had no further account to give of the accident, whether it
were pride or magnanimity, or a mixture of both, which kept him silent.
He would not condescend to a more particular explanation, though it was
discovered in time that some of the smaller bones of his ankle had been
fractured, and that because the injury had not been properly attended
to at first—on account of his having choked down his suffering, and
slurred over the amount of damage he had received—there followed a
protracted and painful imprisonment to the mill-house. And Oliver came
out of it, and the accompanying illness, even though he had allowed a
pair of learned physicians to be summoned to his aid, limping slightly
for life on one ankle—if not on one knee like Horatius Coccles, as the
culminating touch to his awkwardness.
The accident and its result, when the latter came to be fully known,
excited some stir and talk in Friarton. Of course no ordinary fall
on a level country road as smooth as a bowling-green, to a man in
full possession of his wits and limbs, could have occasioned such a
disaster. The marvel was, how Oliver Constable had fallen at all on
the familiar and sure ground even in the uncertain light of gathering
night, people commented with raised eyebrows. But doubtless it was
his best policy to vouchsafe no details of this unaccountable fall.
There could be hardly any question that it had occurred in some
discreditable scuffle or brawl with low companions. The speakers
recalled the moonlight frolics of the young tradesmen, the time out
of mind removal of lamps from honoured doors, the letting loose of a
pig or two from their styes, with the wild attempt at inaugurating a
boar-hunt in the streets of Friarton. Oliver Constable had been known
to be present at these disgraceful performances, though he might have
been charitably supposed beyond taking an active part in the idiotic
riotous amusements. But innate low tastes, possibly a secret, wretched,
craving for what was generally the stimulant to such uproarious
behaviour, had certainly prevailed over the superficial refinement
wrought by education.
Oliver Constable was likely to prove a dangerous tempter and corrupter
in place of a fine model for his class to follow, and a bracing
encouragement by way of example to the young men of the lower middle
rank. He was a proper fellow to mask his self-indulgence and license
under the guise of philanthropy and unworldliness, to pose as a
reformer! Here was a crying instance of a wolf in sheep’s clothing!
Mrs. Hilliard repeated the essence of the scandal to her cousin
Catherine over their afternoon tea. Oliver Constable was coming out in
the colours which might, perhaps, have been detected from the first,
through the daubing done over them, by a man of the world. The accident
which had fixed a permanent shamble on his gait, was said to have
happened in a shocking drunken row.
It was symptomatic that there had been some time ago a split among the
chapel people, with which Oliver Constable was mixed up. In general
these splits were tokens of a disease peculiar to dissenting bodies, in
which nobody outside dreamt of taking any interest. For that matter,
nobody was likely to hear of the divisions unless from servants and
tradespeople. But for Oliver Constable, who ought to have been the
chief pillar of the chapel, to be in bad odour with the members was too
ominous to be passed over. Here was the end of foolish aspirations,
of eccentricity, and not doing at Rome as the Romans did, but aiming
at being hero or saint or a mixture of both. So Apollo and Caliban by
turns had merged into Vulcan, who had been stealing very vulgar and
unhallowed fire indeed when he met his fit punishment. Mrs. Hilliard
was sorry for Fan—yes, she could spare sincere pity for Fan Constable
at last.
Mrs. Hilliard told her tale with a curious mixture of regret
and annoyance—since she had chosen to count kindred with the
Constables—and of lurking satisfaction, because what she had said
of Oliver’s high faluting, what she had prophesied as sure to follow
transcendental ambition, had been borne out. She had called Oliver half
Apollo half Caliban, she herself was half a good-natured woman, half a
mocking-cynic.
Mrs. Hilliard was stopped by Catherine. The cold statue became
strangely warm, and instinct with life and emotion—red hot, actually
gasping for breath in her indignation. ‘I wonder at you, Louisa,’
panted Catherine, ‘to listen to such wicked slander, to give
credence to it for a moment, to put yourself on an equality with its
fabricators, helping in its circulation. Oliver Constable is a good
man, true as steel, pure as honesty itself, kind as a brother, though
he may waste his fine qualities. I will pledge myself for his perfect
innocence of anything so despicable and loathsome as hypocrisy—even if
he were weak enough to be vicious and not as he is, too strong in his
virtue to care for appearances.’
‘He does not lack an enthusiastic champion,’ observed Mrs. Hilliard,
letting the corners of her mouth droop. ‘Take care, my dear, you
are not infallible in your convictions any more than the gentleman
is in his conduct. The passion for being _outré_ seems infectious.
Ah! blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be
disappointed. I have not been so wise as to be without expectation,
though I have had my misgivings. Now I must confess, in spite of your
looking daggers at me, I am disappointed in Oliver Constable. The
sequel threatens to exceed so tremendously what I bargained for. I
only anticipated a ludicrous collapse; I did not go in for a dismal
wreck—at which I shall not be able to laugh, therefore you need not
be angry with me,’ complained Mrs. Hilliard with a half-comical air of
injury.
But Catherine was angry, in season and out of season, with the wrong
as well as the right person. For how did this staunch champion treat
Oliver the next time she met him, limping slowly down Friarton High
Street? She passed him quickly with the slightest and coldest bow that
any of his defamers had yet administered to him. Mrs. Hilliard could no
more have bowed in that fashion than she could have taken up a stone
and thrown it at the culprit. It was the next thing to a cut direct,
and it did cut Oliver to the heart, with the lively impression that
Catherine Hilliard had listened to and believed the worst of the idle,
senseless, shameful lies told of him.
As for Catherine, she was saying to herself in a fever of perverse,
reproachful wrath and mortification. ‘What right had he who was so
manly, courageous and steadfast to cast his pearls before swine till
they turned and rent him: to spend himself in a manner and for a cause
unworthy of the gift: to act so recklessly that he could be thus
monstrously misjudged and maligned?’
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Transcriber Notes
The following are corrections to the original text.
p12 “to” added to (to her, he had).
p45 “unkown” changed to (an unknown specimen).
p52 period added to (something in my line.)
p53 “luciters” changed to (invented before lucifers.)
p62 “quarterspast” changed to (till three quarters past).
p73 “hinfluenzas” changed to (with her colds and influenzas).
p107 closing quote added to (whatever is necessary.’)
p138 comma added to (who was no reformer,)
p148 “taat” changed to (Agne—that her).
p168 “tat” changed to (this instance—that).
p171 “Freemantle” changed to (Mr. Fremantle was content).
p182 closing quote removed from (cousin. That would try).
p213 “suceeed” changed to (succeed in bringing him).
p248 closing quote added to (will be a Nonconformist.’)
p263 period added to (to his individual light.)
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