Oliver Constable, miller and baker, Vol. 3 (of 3)

By Sarah Tytler

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Title: Oliver Constable, miller and baker, Vol. 3 (of 3)

Author: Sarah Tytler


        
Release date: March 29, 2026 [eBook #78319]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1880

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLIVER CONSTABLE, MILLER AND BAKER, VOL. 3 (OF 3) ***
  Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
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                            OLIVER CONSTABLE

                            MILLER AND BAKER

                                   BY

                              SARAH TYTLER

           AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC.

                           _IN THREE VOLUMES_

                                VOL. III.

                                 LONDON
                 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
                                  1880

                         [_All rights reserved_]




                                CONTENTS

                                   OF

                           THE THIRD VOLUME.


  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE

   XXIII. HARRY STANHOPE’S WANT                                        1

    XXIV. FAN’S TRIUMPH                                               22

    XXV. ‘THE DEVIL SHALL NOT HAVE HARRY’                             59

    XXVI. THE PRICE AT WHICH HARRY STANHOPE
          WAS RESCUED                                                 96

   XXVII. THE LAST PENNY PAID                                        126

  XXVIII. OLIVER’S RETURN                                            140

    XXIX. FRESH SERVICE                                              175

     XXX. STUMBLED ACROSS, INTERVIEWED, TAKEN
          AT HIS WORD                                                197

    XXXI. LIFE—AND DEATH                                             214

   XXXII. ‘DO THEY BELIEVE IN ME NOW?’                               240




                           OLIVER CONSTABLE,

                          _MILLER AND BAKER_.




                             CHAPTER XXIII.

                         HARRY STANHOPE’S WANT.


Oliver had liberally allowed Harry Stanhope six months in which to ride
his hobby and grow sick beyond endurance of his _rôle_ of yeoman.

But whereas Harry had entered on the character, on a fine summer
afternoon, in the attractive prospect of hay-making, corn-cutting,
and hop-picking, it was midwinter, with no more agreeable occupations
in view than thrashing corn, pulling turnips, turning over potatoes
in the pits, and ploughing a stiff clay soil under the murky sky of a
short day in muggy weather, still he showed no signs of throwing up the
part in satiety and disgust.

True, he had sufficient leisure to join the other farmers in presenting
himself in the hunting field, and enjoying as good mounts and glorious
runs as the squires or the M.F.H. himself.

It did not come under the head of sport. Harry was persuaded it lay at
the core of his business, that he should attend—not only the Friarton
Market, but every market within a day’s journey. He went to them no
longer in his shirt sleeves, or riding a bare-backed horse as it had
been taken to the watering, not even in the market cart in which he
had prefigured Harry and himself crossing country—out of sight, and
therefore out of danger of wounding the feelings of their aristocratic
relations. Harry had modified so far his Robinson Crusoe and Vicar of
Wakefield notions, as to have set up a trap handsome enough to have
been driven by any of his cousins. The trap was matched by an equally
well-bred, delicate, costly horse, which Harry candidly admitted was
not quite ‘the cheese’ for a yeoman. Yet why not, if he rented and
paid the rent of the paddock in which it ran, afforded the corn for
its feeds, and took care that it should do his work in running like
the wind with him and Horry to the innumerable markets and sales which
the brothers found themselves forced to attend. Harry’s pride ended
with his equipage. He was not to say guilty of affability; he was every
man’s man, in the streets, or corn exchanges, or commercial inns where
the farmers congregated. He was as ready to sit with the last man in
the bar-parlour, and try return races against his trap, as to compare
samples of grain in legitimate business. Harry was all things to all
men—not to gain some for what he fervently believed their good, but
in sheer sociality—with a vain, light-hearted, light-headed love of
popularity, which was at this time his ruling passion. Horace never
thwarted his brother in this or any other inclination. He remained the
abiding shadow inseparable from Harry’s sunshine, and in some respects
a relief from its glare.

Harry was also able to derive no small amount of animation and
amusement from such windfalls in the day’s routine, as brisk bouts of
ratting when a stack was being pulled down, or in the granary after it
was left empty; and he waited religiously every evening on the feeding
of the cattle and horses in the sheds and stables.

Harry was an extremely indulgent, if totally inconsiderate, and
occasionally capricious, master, whose lavish tolerance was only now
and then broken, like the abounding calm of tropical seas, by a storm
violent as it was brief. That Harry spoilt his retainers horribly was
not an objection which his servants were likely to take into account
in the first flush of ‘the young squire’s’ popularity. For in spite of
Harry Stanhope’s well-nigh nettled protests and vigorous acting of his
part, probably because of his over-acting, the would-be yeoman was the
young squire to his labourers, who in the middle of their stolidity
were not altogether without shrewd observation and sound deduction.

Harry not only continued unexpectedly constant to his vocation as he
believed it, he remained faithful to the earliest friendship he had
claimed on his arrival at Copley Grange Farm. He went more frequently
to Friarton Mill than to any other house where he was made welcome,
which was saying a good deal, seeing that Harry’s life, whether in
the way of his business requirements, or when he might be supposed
clear of their urgent obligations, was a constant round of varied
visiting. Indeed, it struck Oliver that Harry grossly abused his
privilege, and came intolerably often, and at absurdly unconventional
seasons, from ‘early morn to dewy eve’—sometimes in the raw air before
breakfast, sometimes through a setting in snowstorm after supper—to the
mill-house, during this winter.

But what could Oliver do? not turn out the thoughtless lad for whom
the elder man had a sneaking kindness, or close the doors against the
soullessly jolly young face, which, however provocative of censure,
always brought with it, when it flashed upon the man, a reflection of
unimpaired freshness, and unburdened lightness of heart.

Since Fan allowed these intrusions, and even seemed to enjoy them, what
was left for Oliver save to shrug his shoulders, grumble to himself, or
deliver the silent hint of turning his back, after the first greeting,
on his visitors? For, of course, Harry dragged over Horry in his
train. And Oliver often left Fan to entertain the two in one, while he
read on unceremoniously at the newspaper or book with which he had been
engaged on their entrance.

Alas! Harry only took the cavalier rudeness for friendliest
encouragement. ‘Don’t apologise to me, old fellow,’ he would enjoin the
master of the house, cheerfully. ‘It is not you I have come to see, it
is Miss Constable,’ Harry would say audaciously. ‘I have come to report
myself to Miss Constable. She has been so good as to take me in hand.
She is making a man—that is a veritable yeoman, of me.’

And Fan lent herself to this egregious fiction. Fan, who had never
interested herself in a single detail of her father and brother’s
trades, who had not so much as made an exception in favour of the
chicks, directed a charmed ear to all Harry Stanhope’s chatter of the
prices in the market, the field which was sown that day, the ox which
had choked itself and been brought round in its stall the night before,
the first long-legged, big-headed calf which he had bought for a song.

Sally Pope grinned at Oliver behind the backs of this most practical
young couple.

Horace Stanhope began to fidget and glance jealously at the master of
the house in his obliviousness. But not even the phenomena of Harry’s
coming at last, once or twice, without his brother, and showing some
slight self-consciousness when the unusual omission was remarked upon,
roused the suspicions of the too secure and single-minded host.

One fine frosty night Harry had walked in alone, uninvited and
unannounced. For Fan’s carefully-trained housemaid had become weary
of announcing the perpetual visitor, and, without any rebuke from
her mistress, had proceeded to treat the special duty as a work of
supererogation where Mr. Harry Stanhope was concerned.

Oliver had nodded and sat still in the shade at his father’s desk,
turning over some papers, keeping his post mainly to preserve the
liberty of pursuing his own train of reflections; while Harry Stanhope
and Fan had put their heads together over the lamp on Fan’s little
table in the chimney-corner, and were, according to Oliver’s conception
of the situation, going over the best plans for growing corn and
rearing stock, and—what was adding insult to injury in reference to
Oliver’s pets, the ducks—the latest contrivances for a high development
of poultry. Not satisfied with the solution of these momentous problems
by lamp-light, when the pair went to the window to predict from the
purple-blue sky and the glitter of the stars hung like lamps of heaven
in the dark branches of the trees of Copley Grange Park, the weather
to-morrow—whether skating on the mill-pond would be the order of the
day, or whether the frost would give way and the scent hold, so that
Harry might join the hunt ten miles off—it seemed to Oliver as if they
must have started afresh to answer the whole code of agricultural
questions over again, by starlight, till his patience was reduced to a
shred.

At last Harry took his departure somewhat abruptly in the end.

Oliver stretched himself with vicious emphasis, and growled, this was
insufferable, he did not think he could stand it much longer.

Fan, generally so quick in retort, said nothing, but she appeared to
have appropriated the observation and taken it to heart; for a moment
later, when she came to bid Oliver goodnight, she suddenly put her
hands upon his shoulders and looked wistfully in his face with tears in
her dark eyes, and her colour wavering—as he remarked with surprise.
‘You are not angry, Oliver, dear?’ she said, with one of her rare
caressing gestures and phrases, which coming as they did unlooked for,
from a high-spirited almost hard little woman like Fan, were apt to sap
a man’s defences, and melt his heart like wax on the spot. ‘You are
not angry, Oliver?’ repeated Fan with a slight quaver in the wistful
earnestness of her voice.

‘Of course I am not angry with _you_, you goose of a Fanchen?’ said
Oliver with affectionate bluster. ‘How can you help Stanhope’s
unconscionable coolness, which begins to be rank impudence? But why
in the name of justice, should I blame you for his faults?’ enquired
Oliver in all simplicity. ‘You are compelled to listen to his rigmarole
in your own house, when I turn him over to you. I own I ought not to
do it, to such an extent,’ admitted Oliver, contritely; ‘but the young
wretch is so indefatigable in preying on our hospitality, and has
acquired such a fatal fluency in airing his farming bosh, that I must
have some relief, or knock him down. I often admire your powers of
endurance, but don’t give the beggar too much line, Fan, if you love
me. I am not sure, whether, after all, his class are the finest judges
of courtesy.’

Fan had flushed crimson at her brother’s words. She knitted her
delicate brows—black brows at the same time, and then as if she had
thought better of it, her lips parted in a half-smile. ‘No, no; don’t
speak treason either of me, or of another,’ she said; and then she
added, a little incoherently, ‘I believe there is nobody so good and
kind as you are, yourself, Oliver, in the whole world. Remember I have
said so, though we quarrelled some time ago, and may quarrel again.
Remember I have told you that you are always my own dear good boy, whom
I have loved all through our lives, whom I love with all my heart at
this moment, whom I could have served, if you would have let me,’ and
Fan fairly hugged Oliver, who resisted stoutly in his mystification,
with a dim apprehension that he might otherwise pledge himself to
something he did not in the least understand.

‘What do you mean?’ cried Oliver. ‘Is Fan also among the wheedlers? For
what mighty boon can she deign to wheedle?’

‘Never mind, it is too late to ask me now—good night.’

Fan succeeded in making her retreat, and in the act of doing so, Oliver
might have seen, if he had been quick at reading women’s faces, that
all the soft relenting and indescribable yearning which had been in
hers a moment ago, had vanished and was replaced by such unmingled
exultation that the girl looked radiant.

It was the last loving altercation which passed between the brother and
sister for many a day.

The next morning, Harry Stanhope wound up his offences against
domestic privacy by re-appearing at Friarton Mill, as if he had
slept at the gate, seeking admission to Oliver before the latter had
completed his toilet. Only the most urgent business could warrant such
pressing attendance. Harry himself, in his superb self-complacency
and confidence, betrayed, nevertheless, a shadow of a doubt of his
reception.

‘You will think I am always here, Constable?’ he said with a confused
laugh.

‘Well, you are here pretty often,’ the aggrieved Oliver put it mildly.
‘I am afraid your other engagements must suffer from your paying us the
compliment of being so much at Friarton Mill; and your brother—he is
not with you this morning—will miss you.’

‘Oh! hang Horry!’ exclaimed Harry hastily; ‘no, I don’t mean that, of
course, and old Horry won’t stand in the way. He’s all right. Besides,
if one’s father and mother, when a fellow possesses them, an’t counted,
a brother can’t have much to say either way, can he?’

‘I don’t know what you’re after,’ said Oliver in perfect sincerity. ‘If
I were a supernumerary in an old play, I ought to exclaim, “Anan,” to
that last enigmatical sentence of yours.’

‘Well, it ain’t easy to come out with it,’ protested Harry, struggling
with what was, for him, the most extraordinary hesitation. ‘Your
sister, Constable—you must have seen she has been goodness itself to
me. I know she will have to furnish the brains and backbone, for my
head-piece ain’t worth much, and my pluck is of the rough and ready
sort, but since she graciously consents to do for me and Horry—to make
a true farmer’s wife, which will be an inestimable advantage to us—I
may take it that you will not have any great objection to accepting me
for a brother-in-law?’

‘Stanhope, have you lost your wits?’ burst out Oliver. ‘Come, there
must be no more of this absurd nonsense. I tell you I will have no such
foolish jesting where my sister is concerned.’

‘Never was farther from jesting in my life!’ declared poor Harry
indignantly.

‘Then let me say, once for all, you must get rid of this idiotic
idea. It won’t do. My sister is not for a fellow like you. I don’t
want to hurt your feelings, but you have somehow tumbled into the
hugest blunder, and I must speak out. I can answer for Fan: she did
not dream of encouraging such a vain delusion, she will be terribly
vexed and annoyed. This comes of masquerading and making-believe. It
seems to me you don’t want a wife for twenty years to come: when you
do, take my advice—if you will excuse me for offering it, after what
I have said—marry strictly within your own class; you of all fellows
require such a safeguard, and the more influential your wife’s people,
the better both for her and you!’ muttered Oliver _sotto voce_. Then
he resumed aloud, ‘Wait till you can persuade a lady to share your
lot—if you will cultivate prudence, you may make it not a bad one—as a
gentleman-farmer.’

Harry was looking at Oliver with such a strong sense of superior
knowledge and wisdom that it disarmed any rising resentment on the
lad’s part, at the tone of provoked disdainful repudiation of the
proposal which Oliver could not help betraying. The contrast between
the truth as Harry realised it and Oliver’s undoubting convictions,
brought out the comic element in the affair so dear to Harry’s boyish
heart, even in the serious mood which had been on him, when he
‘declared his intentions.’

‘Make-believe, indeed!’ cried Harry, lightly; ‘who plays at being
miller and baker?’

‘Not I!’ denied Oliver hotly. ‘I have taken up my father’s business,
which is no unusual thing for a tradesman’s son to do, and I have not
adopted it as a mere makeshift, or as the last resource for a man who
would otherwise be idle; I desire to make it the object of my life;
I do not think any honest trade is unworthy of the dedication of the
trader’s talents to render it as good in every respect as possible. I
trust to do no discredit to my father’s business.’

‘At least you need not be so cocky over other people whose fathers had
not the luck to be in trade,’ remonstrated Harry. ‘As to not wanting
a wife—I being a farmer, and having no competent young woman with my
interest at heart,’ went on Harry, his blue eyes twinkling, ‘to look
after the butter and cheese, the feeding of the calves, the fattening
of the geese, and the multiplying of the eggs and chickens, when I
find I have quite enough to do, even with Horry for my _aide_, to
manage the labourer fellows in the fields and offices, and attend the
markets—if you think I don’t want a wife dreadfully, it is little
you know of a yeoman’s difficulties. As to consenting to try for an
imitation farmer’s wife, why you yourself politely hinted a minute ago
that there was quite enough of the mock article at Copley Grange Farm
already. No, thanks. I knew exactly what the position was when Aggie
spent her holiday weeks at the Farm. The babe could not have told
barley from oats if they had not been in the ear; and though that did
not matter much, I am morally certain she was shaky on the important
question of hens’ nests—whether they were not to be found in bushes,
if not on tree-tops. She spoilt all the dairy produce while she was
here, by insisting on dabbling in it in her ignorance, my housekeeper
complained. And the child was always begging to be amused, and seeking
to go and look at the horses and cattle when it was not convenient and
I ought to have been hard at work elsewhere. She would not be put off
with Horry’s escort; fact was, all my energies were employed in keeping
the peace between the little girl and the cantankerous old man.’

Oliver was forced to laugh, but he laughed harshly. ‘Stanhope, you’re a
donkey if you propose to marry my sister, that she may act as your head
dairymaid and principal hen-wife. That is not her _forte_,’ he said.

‘Do you mean to insult me?’ cried Harry, firing up in spite of his easy
temper. ‘By Jove, you may thank Fan if I bear it. I may have cracked
an ill-timed joke, but it was you who tempted me to it. Fan believes
me; she understands how I love and honour her, and choose her before
all other women; and if she does me the honour to choose me in return,
I suppose she is at liberty to make her choice? Not even a Turk of a
brother, since he is not her father, and she is of age, can prevent
it,’ ended Harry defiantly.

‘This preposterous stuff must be put an end to. I will see my sister.’
Oliver flung out of his room, and encountered Fan hovering over the
breakfast-table, and looking fresh yet pale, like a solitary daisy
blooming in a sheltered corner.




                             CHAPTER XXIV.

                             FAN’S TRIUMPH.


‘Come along, Fan, to the front door, where the fellow has retreated.
Here is a fluke, but the sooner you deal with it the better; you must
spoil your breakfast, and have done with it. Harry Stanhope is as mad
as a hatter this morning, and nothing will bring him back to soberness
of mind save your giving him his _congé_ in so many words. This is
speaking plainly. Are you not amazed? I imagine you never apprehended
such a desperately moonshiny business from Stanhope, who’s in a general
way commonplace and matter-of-fact in his greenness. But come along, it
will not do to keep the young idiot waiting.’

‘But what if there are two of us as mad as hatters?’ said Fan, blushing
and brightening up like the white daisy when the red tips of its petals
catch the beams of the sun.

‘Fan, you cannot be so crazy, so weak to imbecility!’ cried Oliver,
incredulously; and then, as his unbelief began to be shaken by her
looks, still more than her words, he protested passionately on her
account: ‘A boy like Harry Stanhope! the merest boy in his fancies, as
you have had abundant proof; hardly responsible for his actions, not
fit to know his own mind, as sure to change as the wind.’

‘He is not so much younger a boy than you are, Oliver,’ said Fan, with
restrained spirit. ‘He is a little older than I am in years, and I
don’t feel so very youthful in spirit. I should be inclined to think I
was capable of knowing my own mind, and being held responsible for my
actions. But, no doubt, women are a great deal older, in proportion,
than men. You are all boys to us,’ said Fan, with demure motherliness.
‘I have even ventured to call a sage like you a boy.’

‘Fan,’ said Oliver, ‘don’t drive me beside myself. This is no occasion
for teasing, and I could not have believed you the woman to begin
to tease in such circumstances. I have been accustomed to think you
sensible, capable of self-respect, rather proud than meek. Have you
considered what sort of beggar Stanhope is, apart from his birth and
breeding, and the grace which they have given him. He is feather-headed
and an empty canister—if ever there were one. He has never thought
of anything save his own pleasure since he was born. He is incapable
of self-restraint, even if he knew the thing by name. He is the
incarnation of selfishness—genial and jolly now, I grant you, but
which will without fail grow coarser and harder with years. At forty
Harry Stanhope’s stupidity and self-indulgence will be palpable to the
shallowest intellect, and so may his grossness—even his brutality—if
his good angel do not interfere.’

‘His good angel will interfere. How dare you accuse and prophecy evil
of a better man than yourself—if humility and kindliness are better
than arrogance and harshness, as the Bible teaches?’

Fan stood at bay for her lover. ‘Harry is not a student or a scholar,
any more than I am by nature,’ she said more quietly; ‘but that
does not make him and me less of a man and a woman than if we were
a fantastic theorist and an abstracted visionary. If he thinks of
his pleasure, why not? when his pleasure has always been manly and
honest—and is not that to his credit, left to himself, to all intents
and purposes, as he has been? And it is not true that he cares only for
himself; he has been a good and true brother, as he will be good and
true in all the relations of life.’

Oliver groaned. ‘Do you know what the farmers, with whom he classes
himself, say of his conceited, childish enterprise? They lighten their
own troubles by guffawing over his muddles and messes. They say, “The
plough would need to turn up gold for Mr. Stanhope to reap a harvest,
even if times were as good as they are bad for agriculture.” They
calculate confidently he will have succeeded in making such a mull of
the business into which he has rushed, without a particle of knowledge
or experience, that he will be sold out and polished off in three or
four years at the farthest.’

‘The more need of the nearest and dearest of his friends to stand by
him,’ said Fan, with steadfast eyes.

‘His best friend will not be able to stand by him and defend him from
the ruinous consequences of the new habits he is grafting on the
old,’ maintained Oliver doggedly. ‘Harry Stanhope was known at Oxford
as one of the most careless and reckless of the undergraduates who
were his contemporaries. He was so unboundedly social that he was
never missing where company of any kind congregated. If he could not
get good, he could put up with bad. He was a regular frequenter of
village alehouses, as well as a conspicuous figure at every “wine”
within his reach. Now—country-town markets and the farmers’ circles in
commercial inns are his great resorts. To a man of Harry Stanhope’s
accommodating temperament, every company in which swallowing strong
drink is inseparably associated with friendly intercourse, must prove
playing with fire. God forbid that I should say the lad is cursed by a
fatal taint, but it will be next to a miracle in his case if the demon
is disappointed in getting possession of his victim.’

‘Oliver,’ said Fan, with bated breath in her anger, as she stood on the
hearthrug, confronting him, ‘who is it that did not care though he were
mixed up with the low larks of the shop lads of Friarton, so that even
respectable people could grow common liars and slanderers, taking it
upon them to say that he was sentenced to carry about in his person, to
his dying day, the mark of his degrading excesses?’

‘Let them say it,’ retorted Oliver, raising his head, quickly, and
without flinching; ‘that is another affair. The end may justify the
means, if some small love of fair play and poor humanity keep a man
true to his colours, through evil as well as good report; if his
conscience clear him, and they who ought to know, are satisfied he
is falsely accused. But only charity on the brain can regard Harry
Stanhope as bitten by a rabid regard for his kind, or for anybody save
himself, and perhaps his second self Horry.’

He tried her on other grounds. ‘How can you take it upon you to be
a farmer’s wife, Fan? How can you pretend to acquirements which you
never possessed, which you have never so much as tried to gain? You
have always had the strongest prejudice against the position of a
tradesman, and I take it you cannot put a yeoman on a much higher
level. Your ambition, which you did not conceal, was to lead the life
of a conventional lady.’

‘I was silly,’ said Fan, composedly. ‘I did not know what a gentleman
could do, and yet retain his gentle bearing unimpaired. I never met a
true gentleman—forgive me, Oliver—till I saw Harry Stanhope. I will
learn all farmhouse work that a farmer’s wife can do, for the sake of
my farmer, to help him to conquer fortune, more quickly than I learned
lessons at school to fit me to be your companion. I am not afraid to
say that I will be a good farmer’s wife—behind none in the country.’
Fan pledged herself proudly, and Oliver knew the pledge would be
redeemed, though Fan died for it.

‘Are you willing to enter a family, every member of which will look
down on you, if one of them own you at all, which I very much doubt?
Can you not open your wilfully closed eyes enough to see that Horace
Stanhope has not come here of late with his brother?’

‘Oliver!’ said Fan with flashing eyes, ‘you are seeking to pique me
by an objection which you must know does not exist in connection with
Harry. He has no people with claims on him. He has no friends who
would consider his welfare before any good to themselves, save me and
his brother—who has not gone against him, and surely the more reason
we should not forsake him. Did not Harry break off from his uncles
and aunts when he became a farmer? They allowed him to follow his own
course, and they must accept the consequences. “If they cut it up
rough,” as he says, “they have themselves to blame for it,” when they
consented to what was likely to happen, if he and Horry became yeomen.
Poor Horry, he would be as jealous as a woman of any other woman’s
coming between him and Harry!’ said Fan, with a little laugh and blush;
‘but I will help him to get over it for Harry’s sake: he is waiving
his objections already. The worst of it is, I am not just such a girl
as Agneta, with whom the poor dear fellow was always sparring, so that
Harry had to come in with his sweet temper, and reconcile the two. But
do you imagine that I find fault with Horace Stanhope because he would
not count any woman beneath the rank of a duke’s daughter, who was not
beautiful as the day, and an angel of virtue, deserving of Harry? There
would have been the old search over again, if the devoted soul had been
consulted:

  ‘Where is the maiden of mortal strain
   May match with the Baron of Triermain?

‘It is little you know of things, Oliver, though you are a
philosopher, if you think that would have made me angry with Horry,
who will soon forgive me, because of the sympathy between us. Besides
Horry, there is only Agneta who is really interested,’ said Fan, after
an instant’s pause, ‘and she is my friend.’

‘It remains to be seen how far the friendship will stand this test!’
said Oliver with gloomy scepticism. He was so exasperated as to add a
taunt, for which he was sorry the moment after he had uttered it. ‘Why
don’t you admit frankly that you are besotted enough to believe the
whole race of Vere de Vere will open their arms to receive you into
their castles? That must be the real inducement to form such an insane
connection—not the cheap merits of a lad like Harry Stanhope.’

‘If you think so badly of me, Oliver, even though I may have given you
some cause by being foolish and worldly-minded, I cannot help it!’
said Fan, deeply wounded and offended.

There was no more to be said. Harry Stanhope must not be kept kicking
his heels in the mill-house court a moment longer. As Harry had calmly
stated at an early stage of the contest, Oliver could not prevent his
sister from making her own choice of a husband: she was of age, she
was mistress of herself in every way, including the disposal of her
little fortune. With respect to that, Oliver had been more just to
Harry Stanhope than her brother had shown himself to Fan. Oliver had
not attributed mercenary motives to the lad, as the person who ought to
have known her best had fastened upon Fan the all-powerful promptings
of a vain and small ambition. Oliver was quite aware that men of the
class to which Harry belonged are often as good arithmeticians as the
huxterers whom the gentlemen despise. The sons of the most ancient
and noble families, having the bluest blood in their veins, will
look out for ‘tin’ with their wives, even though the suitors have to
descend into mercantile walks and put up with plebeian antecedents,
in order to secure the indispensable metal, as unblushingly as the
northern farmer sought ‘prupitty’ with his daughter-in-law. Perhaps the
young patricians may plead the obligation of necessity in the cases
of all save the heads of their houses. The eldest son has his future
secured; but if he has unfortunate younger brothers, it may reasonably
be said—in spite of the gentlemanly professions provided for them,
which, when it comes to that, for the most part imply the spending
rather than the earning of money—they cannot dig, and to beg they are
ashamed. But Harry was not of this stamp, though he may have used their
slang in conversation. His mortal enemy could not accuse him of being
calculating. His defects, however flagrant, were free from mercenary
meanness.

Oliver looked upon himself as compelled to yield a formal outward
assent, in contradiction to the inward protest, to Fan’s right in the
selection of a mate.

Therefore, there was no open rupture in the little family. Harry
Stanhope, after his momentary spurt of anger, only laughed at his
future brother-in-law’s manner of receiving his first overtures, and
at Oliver’s way of conducting himself in the later arrangements. In
Harry’s eyes, Oliver’s behaviour was in keeping with the grumpiness
which the young aristocrat had always imputed to his democratic senior.
It was part of the _rôle_ of a radical, which Harry conceived Oliver to
be.

Harry could afford to treat the matter lightly; neither did Oliver,
after the first pang of painful surprise and bitter disappointment,
wish to quarrel outright with Fan’s bridegroom. Thus the two preserved
a truce; though they fell off, rather than drew closer, in whatever
friendship had hitherto existed between them, in the prospect of their
nearer alliance. Oliver turned over Harry entirely to Fan, as, no
doubt, he might have done in any circumstances, unless the young fellow
had been Oliver’s chosen chum and mate as well as Fan’s.

Fan smothered the keen regret called forth by her brother’s unshaken,
inveterate hostility to the marriage he could not hinder, and to the
gulf deepening between them, as best she might.

In every other light Fan’s lot was a triumph. For she had never
been mercenary, any more than Harry had been. She had been aspiring
in a sense, with a craving for superficial refinement, as somehow
representing to Fan the far deeper refinement and nobility of nature,
of which the surface polish—however becoming in itself and pleasant
to encounter—is by no means the inseparable accompaniment; and for
pure love of Harry Stanhope, Fan was prepared to crush her individual
tastes. She was willing to be a poor man’s partner, to drudge as a
practical housekeeper, to toil after another fashion as the notable
wife of a lucky farmer, to forget her girlish dreams of bountiful ease,
culture, and elegance.

Fan had her bright, brief day both in a higher and a lower sense. She
enjoyed that short interval in which a woman is beside herself and
counts herself—not merely the happiest of women, but the only happy
woman in the world deserving of the name, because she has not only won
a heart in exchange for her own, but because this heart, subdued by
her power, is the heart of hearts to her, compared to which all other
hearts are little better than dross.

Fan had also the lower, but what was to her the genuine and natural
gratification of being conscious that those of her neighbours on
whose opinions she had been wont to set store, having arrived at the
unanimous conclusion that Fan Constable had done well for herself,
became suddenly moved to change their chorus of condemnation to a
chant of glorification. The Fremantles and Wrights proved themselves
no more mercenary than Fan and Harry. The magnates of Friarton had not
worshipped in fear and trembling a big burly image of mammon, but a
shadowy fetish of gentility. Fan Constable, whom the ladies and the
professional set now acknowledged to be the most charming ladylike
girl in the neighbourhood, would not be a farmer’s wife to them.
She would—since the inferior distinction merged and was lost in the
superior—be the wife of Harry Stanhope, grandson of Lord St. Ives,
nephew by marriage of Lord Mount Mallow. Accordingly these authorities
renewed their withdrawn attentions with an eager lavishness, in
striking contrast to the donors’ former cautious, stinted dole of
recognition. They betrayed the knowledge, which Fan shared, that it
would soon be her turn to pay them attention.

When Fan’s honours were fully fledged, she might have a share of the
liberty which was vouchsafed to her husband, granted to her. She might
skim the milk in her dairy, and gather the eggs in her poultry-yard,
even carry them in the skirt of her gown, as Agneta Stanhope had
carried them, without challenge. And if Harry had been the son and not
the grandson of a viscount, and thus only one degree instead of two
removed from a peerage, or if his father’s father had been a marquis or
a duke, who knows but that Fan might have been allowed to go on to milk
her cows and feed her calves—not in frolic?

Mrs. Hilliard was impressed by Fan’s promotion. ‘That girl Fan
Constable has proved her mettle with perfectly lawful weapons, for she
is too true a little Philistine to stoop to employ any other.’ Mrs.
Hilliard ate her leek before her cousin, and it was no small comfort to
Louisa Hilliard, in her state of mind at the moment, that Catherine was
next to nobody when eating a leek was in question.

‘Both of these Constables have used me ill, have got the better of
me—of us all.’ Mrs. Hilliard spoke ruefully for her. ‘Fan, with her
negative drawing-room and positive attitude, has been and gone and done
it under our very noses.’

‘Done what?’ enquired the only half-awake Catherine.

‘Distanced her competitors—the Houghtons, the head-master’s nieces; how
do I know how many? all who had entered for the prize. She has overcome
and trampled upon her foes, and carried off the chance which might have
been yours, my dear, only you sat still and missed it.’

‘Was Harry Stanhope my chance in life?’ enquired Catherine, opening
her weary eyes. ‘Have I missed my all in losing him? Well, I did not
flatter myself there was any great thing to look forward to in my
career, if a woman can be said to have a career, but I have been guilty
of the presumption of dreading (and do you know the dread gave a kind
of trembling interest to life?) that there might be greater losses to
encounter than that of Harry Stanhope’s handkerchief—not that there was
ever the remotest prospect of its being thrown at me.’

‘Catherine!’ and with the exclamation Mrs. Hilliard looked at her
cousin gravely for once, though her lively mind soon reverted to its
ordinary track. ‘You frighten me, and that is treating me still worse
than the Constables have treated me. My cousins, whom I owned, have
eluded my grasp, and got beyond me, the one floored and the other
crowned—alike disqualified for serving as food for my entertainment.
But I never asked you to entertain me’—Mrs. Hilliard assailed
Catherine, growing serious again—‘only to entertain yourself. And if
you cannot do it in any other way, I am tempted to wish I could approve
of a Protestant sisterhood for you. It might afford you a refuge when
the world makes you so tired that you seem in danger of falling down
under the load. I can lift it off myself with my little finger, but I
cannot with my two hands, and all my might, remove the burden from you,
poor child.’ The clear ring of Mrs. Hilliard’s voice had softened, and
there was moisture in the eyes usually so dry in their sparkle.

‘Never mind me, Louisa,’ said Catherine, roused to faint surprise and
reluctance to cause trouble. ‘I am only too well off, you know. I am
sickening—that is, if I am sickening—“of a vague disease;” I ought to
have to work for my bread—supposing bread is worth working for—yet
starvation must really be an unpleasant process to stimulate so
many people to frantic exertions in order to avert the catastrophe.
Protestant sisterhoods would not suit me, nor would Catholic nunneries,
though I think, of the two, I should prefer the last, as possessing a
respectable antiquity and consistency. But to enter either would be a
sham in me, since I really believe that the Son of God could help me
staying with you, as well as with any lady superior or abbess—that we
are as near heaven living in the world in which He lived, as when we
try in vain to get out of it. It would only be a change of yoke, and my
shoulders seem to be slimmer than other women’s,’ remarked Catherine
with a forlorn smile. ‘Besides, no sisterhood would receive a menagerie
with me—and whatever else I might be brought to resign, I do not see
how I could get on without a large small family of beasts and birds.’

‘Thank you for the implied compliment,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, recovering
herself with a laugh. ‘Catherine, you administer tonics, though you
won’t swallow them.’

When the time came for Mrs. Hilliard to offer the usual
congratulations, her hearty admiration of Fan’s prowess so influenced
the lady, that she presented the tribute cordially, and was entitled to
complain that Fan had no reason to receive it superciliously.

But Catherine was not merely languid in her felicitations, she stopped
short in them, and substituted an uncalled-for piece of condolence:
‘How dull it will be for you with Mr. Stanhope and his brother at
Copley Grange Farm, when you have been accustomed to solitude with
your own brother!’ looking at amazed, indignant Fan, with great
uncomprehending, commiserating eyes. ‘I hope you will not die of
_ennui_ after the first week. No, I don’t forget that Mr. Stanhope is
very fond of visiting, and you will have to visit a great deal with
him, but won’t that also be dreadfully fatiguing?’

The Polleys and Dadds were not behind the others with their ovation;
but, to Fan’s immense relief, she found she had established by this
last step such a distance between herself and her early associates
that they no longer even attempted to bridge it over. Fan Constable
had succeeded in passing out of their sphere. They wished her joy as
it were through Harry Stanhope, and they were as respectful in the
expression of their good wishes, as if the rank which she was so soon
to borrow from him already belonged to her.

Old Dadd refrained from a single joke, and was almost solemn in
alluding to the subject.

Mrs. Polley only bristled up to Oliver, and represented to him that he
would no longer be content to sit down in her back parlour, since he
might be making the round of all the castles in the kingdom in company
with his brother-in-law.

Jack Dadd actually called Fan ‘Miss Constable,’ unless in the strictest
privacy, among his most intimate cronies, or as a means of teasing the
Polley girls.

’Mily Polley did not propose to call on Mrs. Stanhope. ‘She is a cut
above us, now, and no mistake, when she’ll be going among his grand
relations—generals and admirals, and Lady This and Lady That, every
time he takes her up to town. I dare say the fine people will snub
her, but Fan Constable won’t mind that, since they can’t close their
doors against her, and she married to their nephew and first cousin;
and she’ll give as good as she’ll take, I’ll say that for her. She’s
never behind. But I tell you what, ’Liza, we’ll put our pride in our
pockets—what’s the good of letting it stand in our way? and come round
mother, and go to church instead of to chapel, the first Sunday after
Mrs. Stanhope has returned from her wedding jaunt. We’ll try if we
can’t get a wrinkle—as Jack Dadd says—out of her new bonnet. Only Fan
Constable does not know how to dress herself. Yet she has caught a
duck of a real gentleman, like Mr. Stanhope is, with her dowdy clothes,
and her plain sewing, and her whity-brown face,’ cried ’Mily, in
exasperation at the contradiction.

‘She had been his fate,’ said ’Liza, mysteriously.

‘You shut up, ’Liza, and don’t talk as if you believed in
fortune-telling—not that I should mind a bit getting my fortune told
by a right old woman, in a red cloak, with a pack of cards. It would
be lovely. And, oh my! wouldn’t mother be down on me, if she found me
out!’ cried ’Mily, in high glee at the bare idea of the servant girl’s
escapade.

‘It is an instinct of self-preservation on the fellow’s part, and on
Fan’s it is the old infatuation and the recent reaction working their
worst together. There is no help for it,’ said Oliver to himself,
slowly and sadly.

Beyond the area of Copley Grange Farm every voice of every Stanhope
was dumb on the announcement of Harry’s marriage. The members of the
Stanhope family certainly agreed with Oliver, that it was useless to
interpose from any hope of dealing effectually with the consummation
of Harry’s descent in life, to which his friends had formerly been
provoked into giving a reluctant consent.

At last Agneta wrote to Fan, very prettily, within certain limits.
Agneta was glad that her dear old Harry should be happy. She thanked
Fan for making his happiness. She trusted that she and Fan would always
remain friends. But there was not a word of Agneta’s coming down to
Copley Grange Farm to grace the marriage; not a hint of any future
visit; not a syllable of meeting Fan again in the whole course of their
respective lives.

Fan read the letter without any remark. As she read she grew still
more colourless in her olive paleness, which ’Mily Polley called
‘whity-brownness,’ but there was also a more steadfast set of her
well-cut mouth, a more indomitable expression in her brown eyes.

She did not give Oliver the letter to read; indeed, the brother and
sister were no longer on such terms as to volunteer an exchange of
confidences. She only surrendered the dainty epistle to Harry at his
special request.

Harry reddened and bit his lip as he took in, at a couple of glances,
the familiar writing on the page and a half of note-paper. ‘Dash it!
I did not think Aggie could have been such a cold-hearted chit,’ he
muttered; ‘I did think she was more of a lady than to be a stuck-up
snob.’

‘Never mind,’ said Fan, with determined magnanimity; ‘I dare say it is
hard for her to have you stoop for a wife.’

‘Stoop!’ protested Harry, who was loyal in his attachments, if he was
anything; ‘it is my first regular attempt at climbing since I got out
of the garret window at one of our tutors. I nearly broke my neck then,
but I have fallen on my feet this time. I have done the best stroke of
business I can ever hope to accomplish, though I should live to head
all the markets round with my heifers and south downs, and win the
prizes from the Prince and all the agricultural nobs in the country
at the show at Islington. Ask your brother who has the best of the
bargain in our blessed contract. It is all Aunt Julia’s doing. In her
aping of liberality and angling for popularity she is at heart the most
time-serving and intolerant old woman under the sun.’

‘Then it will be a victory indeed, if we can force her, and everybody
else with her, to come round to our side at last,’ said Fan, fired by
her dauntless courage.

There was not more than a grain of truth in Oliver’s cruel
accusation of what had led Fan to listen to Harry Stanhope. But
that fructifying grain, together with the passion of her love for
Harry, helped the unimaginative, rational young woman to rear an airy
structure—representing her ultimate relations with the Stanhopes
and the great world. There was Harry encouraged, aided, ‘kept up to
the scratch,’ by his wife’s proud and loving support in all manly
energy and perseverance in his profession. There were his name, fame,
and fortune established, as the most enterprising and successful
gentleman-farmer in the country. (Fan paid no heed to the signs of the
times or to impending agricultural distress, in her dream). There was
the reappearance of the Hartleys on every rumour of a fresh election,
with John Hartley, thankful to accept Harry Stanhope as an ally on
equal terms, with Lady Cicely, who had once demurred at the possibility
of Fan’s accompanying her brother to dine at Copley Grange, pleased
to drive over with her husband, and dine herself at Copley Grange
Farm. Of course, that must be after the old farmhouse was added to and
improved, so as not to be altogether ill-matched with the manor-house.
If the _entrée_ to the manor-house were secured during the Hartleys’
temporary occupation of Copley Grange, it would almost certainly remain
free to the Stanhopes when Mr. Amyott resumed his permanent reign. The
example of the Stanhopes’ landlord would be followed by other squires
whose houses were within visiting distance of the Farm.

Fan, in her chrysalis state, had often looked from the mill side of
the Brook across to the park and great house, with its dignified blot
of an Italian façade. She had fancied how bountiful and gracious life
must be there, contrasted with life in the back shops and parlours
of the Polleys and Dadds. But she had felt then that if by virtue of
Oliver’s genius and scholarship she ever rose to cross the threshold
of such an Eden of refinement and culture, its roses would be full of
thorns for her, simply because she would not be, like the daughters
of that privileged region, to the manner born. Innately she was a
lady, but outwardly she would blunder and flounder in the labyrinths
of precedence and etiquette, or amidst the appalling topics of sport,
horses and wines, from all acquaintance with which her sex, alas! did
not exempt a woman of the higher orders. Fan would cause flippant
waiting-maids to titter, and staid butlers to frown, at her mistakes.

Now all this was changed. When Fan should procure the ‘Open, Sesame!’
to the charmed houses by so strange a process as that of becoming a
yeoman’s wife and doing a yeoman’s wife’s work, all her troubles would
be at an end. Harry had been born to the purple, and he would always be
at hand to give involuntarily the cue which she would take as quickly
as ever King Cophetua’s beggar-maid borrowed lustre from her royal
husband, and developed without loss of time into a right queenly lady.
Fan would not wear sparkling diamonds or sumptuous velvet, indeed, but
she had never cared for jewels or fine clothes or luxury. What she
had cared for she would attain, the simple elegance of bearing and
behaviour of a gentlewoman, by art as well as by nature.

In the meantime, while these chickens were unhatched, Friarton took it
as a matter of course that Harry Stanhope’s kindred should begin by
looking coldly on the projected alliance between Copley Grange Farm and
Friarton Mill, and did not think of deposing Fan from her pedestal as a
bride because she was subjected to this ordeal.

One relative came forward before the knot was tied, and accepted
Fan—not simply as an inevitable misfortune, but as a member of the
illustrious family of Stanhope. The next time Harry came to the Mill,
after Agneta’s note had been received there, he was not only attended
by his second shadow; a voice, which had been hitherto dumb, spoke.

Horace managed, with his surly awkwardness—which was something
quite different from Oliver Constable’s awkwardness—and his bilious
ungraciousness, even in conferring a compliment, which made it seem as
if a good-natured impulse went entirely against the grain with him, to
propose himself as Harry’s groomsman. ‘If you don’t mind, if no other
body will serve Harry’s purpose, and help to turn him off,’ he said to
Fan in the voice, the tone of which was out of tune and grating, unless
sometimes when he addressed his brother.

Fan had never smiled so sweetly on Harry in the whole course of his
wooing, as she now smiled on the grudging, unjoyous groomsman, who,
sure enough, was to be Harry’s servant, not hers. ‘Oh! I am glad and
grateful that Harry’s oldest and best friend is to stand by him on his
marriage day,’ she said audibly to the dull ears. ‘I know you are not
thinking of me, and I do not wish you to think of me—I only say this to
express, though you may not care to hear, what an obligation and honour
you are conferring on me by acting as Harry’s brother still. But it is
so, Mr. Horace’ (she had not begun to call him by his Christian name,
just as he had never called her anything save ‘Miss Constable.’ She was
in some apprehension that ‘Miss Constable’ would not even pass into
‘Mrs. Stanhope’ with Horace). ‘I will never forget your kindness to
Harry,’ she finished.

He looked at her for a moment with an impulse of furious displeasure
added to his ordinary gruff, sardonic mood, as if he questioned her
right to thank him for Harry, and bade her be wary of taking so
much upon her. Then her tender tact penetrated the thick skin of his
jaundiced, warped nature. ‘All right, Fan,’ he said, touching her hand
and dropping it again, and giving what exacting, fastidious people
might have classed as a ghastly grin. But from that date Fan was
happily convinced that though she was a very small person compared to
Harry in his brother’s eyes, Horace had forgiven her on the spot, and
taken her, for all time to come, into a humble corner of the chamber of
his affections, since she had shown herself capable of comprehending,
in a degree, what the brothers were to each other, and would never seek
to separate them. Thus Harry Stanhope’s lovers and slaves became sworn
allies, and not vowed adversaries.

The hard lines were for Oliver. It was all very well for Sally Pope
to cackle that now Miss Fan had got her will, and she wished the
young mistress well, neither was it any harm to speed her going, for
marriage was the best lot that could befall most young women, and she
would ‘fettle’ Master Oliver—see how comfortable she would make him, in
all the old homely ways, like a king with his faithful housekeeper.

Oliver had no doubt Sally would make his body comfortable, but what of
the refreshment of his mind and heart now that his father was dead,
when his only sister—the little Fan of other days—alienated from him
already, should have left him in order to make a foolish _mésalliance_
of which no good could come? Friarton Mill in its sweet domestic beauty
would be robbed of its chief attraction so soon as Fan was gone.




                              CHAPTER XXV.

                   ‘THE DEVIL SHALL NOT HAVE HARRY.’


The three years allotted by his brother-farmers for Harry Stanhope to
run through what small patrimony he had invested in Copley Grange Farm,
and what credit he had begun upon, did their work more effectually than
the months given by Oliver Constable for Harry to tire of his part as a
yeoman.

Fan had held her husband back with a little hand which was like a
vice for staunchness, but which had, at last, loosened its grip under
overwhelming pressure.

Horace had thrown his passive dead weight in the way, to impede Harry’s
swift progress to ruin.

Oliver Constable had not stood aside in sulky neutrality, or hard
inflexibility flavoured with vindictiveness, to witness the fulfilment
of his predictions. He would have given much for them to prove false.
He did all he could to prevent their realisation. He had little in
common with his brother-in-law, and it was in the characters of the two
men to grow always more apart instead of nearer to each other. Still
Oliver, though he was not much in Harry Stanhope’s company, and though
Harry showed himself constantly more restive, under any influence which
Oliver had ever possessed over him, tried his best in the thankless
office of looking after Harry, when he was beyond his wife’s scope, and
of interposing to save him—not merely from the consequences of his own
folly, but from falling a victim to his neighbours’ weaknesses. As a
result of this knight-errantry on Oliver’s part, there was an entire
rupture between him and Jack Dadd on Harry’s account.

Harry Stanhope’s incapacity for drawing distinctions—moral as well as
social—his vanity and passion for popularity, had all pointed with
tolerable clearness to one conclusion from the first. He had no notion
of what was expedient. He was not particular in his easygoing fashion.
He was bound to turn soon from his self-imposed obligations, selected
very much at haphazard, and sitting with the greatest lightness upon
him. He must have excitement of some kind, at any cost.

The upper, and, to be fair, the more decorous, set in Friarton,
which had commenced by being delighted with their opposite in Harry
Stanhope’s _abandon_, matched as it was with his gentle birth and
breeding, ceased to prize his company when they found it was bestowed
on their social inferiors with a thousand times the lavishness
and indiscriminateness which they had severely censured in Oliver
Constable. And all the time Oliver had claimed a right to act as he
did, and asserted a principle in it, while he had shown a method in
his madness. In the course of the last three years, he had brought his
accusers to acknowledge that, though he had lost himself in the matter
of his money, talents, and education, with the desirable position which
they might have commanded, he was not a reprobate, and he had known
when to stop long before the climax of individual degradation.

As Harry Stanhope ceased to be the idol of the gentlemen and ladies,
he became also less of the pet and more of the butt of the lower grade
into which he was increasingly thrown. The young farmers and tradesmen
with whom he fraternised, not only at market and in cricket-matches and
games of bowls, but on every occasion, public and private, still looked
up to him in many things, and copied him—not always to their benefit,
but a stronger tincture of contempt was getting infused into their
liking.

This was especially true of Jack Dadd, who, while he continued proud
of being hand-in-glove with Harry Stanhope, did not scruple to make a
cat’s-paw of his friend, and rather enjoyed leading him into a scrape
and leaving him there. This disloyalty and shade of baseness did not
spring necessarily from Jack’s class or calling, and they had still
less to do with his natural good temper. They belonged to long-standing
class feuds and the lingering spite thus engendered. It was almost
inevitably wreaked on a person who, however ready to forget social
prejudices, sprang still from the privileged order.

Oliver humbled himself in the room of Harry Stanhope, and through Harry
in the place of Fan, to remonstrate with Jack Dadd.

‘You are older than Stanhope, Jack,’ Oliver reminded his quondam
friend, who had bragged earlier of their friendship, ‘and you were not
brought up in the very odour of thoughtlessness.’

‘So I suppose I ain’t fit to go about with your gentleman
brother-in-law, unless as his keeper. “Not if I know it;” “Not for
Joe,”’ interrupted Jack, rudely and flippantly. ‘I ain’t so fond of
being a fellow’s keeper, as you are, Constable, though you don’t seem
to like to try it on Harry Stanhope. I thought you had got a lesson and
rid yourself of such priggishness, long ago. It ain’t a compliment to
Stanhope to make out he’s not fit to take care of hisself, or to choose
his company and be on equal terms with them. Lord! it was a funny sort
of equality last night when I cut my stick, just as he was challenging
the stableman at the “Wheat Ears” to box with him, Dummy being to hold
their jackets, I take it. Stanhope ain’t proud; I’ll say that for him,
neither when he’s as tight as a lord, nor when he’s as sober as a
judge—which don’t often happen now-a-days. It comes to this, Constable,
I’ve had enough of your sauce of dictation. There was not so much
difference between that and your sister’s airs, and a fine pass they’ve
brought her to: got her a gentleman for a husband, no doubt—and, what
is more, he’s worth the two of you; but he’s made her work for him so
as keeping a shop would have been a joke by comparison, and he’ll kick
the causeway all the same.’

After that conversation there was an end to friendly intercourse
between Oliver and Jack, and to any fond hope which the former had once
been so conceited as to entertain, of swaying his brother-tradesman to
higher aims.

Harry Stanhope’s deterioration in every respect included his inveterate
idleness in all pursuits which did not take the form of sport or
frolic, while ploughing, sowing, cattle-feeding, even hay-making
and reaping, when they ceased to be novelties, ceased also to be
sport or frolic, lost every element of interest and amusement, and
became positively repugnant to the man who remained always a boy.
He neglected his farming utterly, or made wild havoc with it in his
fitful, reckless operations, forced sales, and consequent desperate
losses.

With all this wanton waste Fan had nothing to do. She had accomplished
wonders in the _rôle_ she had undertaken. Her dairy produce and poultry
were from the first among the best in the neighbourhood. She competed
successfully with those farmers’ wives who were either nothing save
dairymaids and henwives, or who employed experienced servants to
do their mistresses’ work by proxy. Any prizes which agricultural
societies awarded to the tenants of Copley Grange Farm were for its
mistress’s butter and cheese, goslings and turkey poults.

And all the time Fan was not a dairymaid alone, she was a gentleman’s
wife deserving of the name. In order to unite the contrasting
attributes, she rose up early and lay down late, and ate the bread
of carefulness. She changed her dress as often as any fine lady who
has nothing to do, no occupation or pleasure in life save dressing
herself by the help of a maid. Fan was rewarded when Harry noticed the
freshness of her calicot morning gown, the daintiness of her afternoon
piqué, the good taste of her evening grenadine.

Neither Harry nor Horace had an idea of gardening beyond sticking a
spade into the ground once in the course of the spring and leaving it
there after a quarter of an hour, or gathering an occasional handful of
strawberries, while the cook demanded a regular supply of vegetables,
and the masters missed seasonable fruit when it was not forthcoming,
appearing to expect cherries, peaches, and pears to drop from the skies
like manna. Fan read garden chronicles alternately with dairy manuals,
and spent many a fatiguing hour of her early married life striving to
direct the labours of an improvised gardener drawn from the ranks of
the field workers. It was as much out of the question for Harry to keep
a skilled gardener as it was for Fan to set up a qualified housekeeper
and an experienced dairymaid, though Harry would have attempted it
without a doubt if he had been suffered. But Fan stinted herself
of all other worthy assistants, because a good cook and a trained
table-boy who could cater for the two young men and wait upon them as
they had been used to be waited upon, became absolutely necessary to
the Stanhopes, as soon as their establishment at Copley Grange Farm
acquired a settled character, and ceased to partake of the nature of
living for a time _al fresco_, or _in villeggiatura_.

When Fan became painfully conscious that she had not only her own
arduous double and treble duties to attend to, she must also supply
deficiencies on Harry’s part, she rose to the occasion gallantly.
She added agricultural journals, treatises on husbandry, essays on
farm stock, to her other diligent studies. She crammed herself; she
sought to coach Harry. She tired herself to death and exposed herself
to innumerable catarrhs and coughs wandering over the fields in all
kinds of weather, to win him, by her close sympathetic companionship,
to go among his men, or else to show them, in his interest, that there
was the eye of a mistress, if not a master, on their work. She drove
with Harry and Horace to the markets, and if it had not been to spare
Harry’s dignity as a yeoman and his credit as a man—since poor Fan had
a double object and a double terror in accompanying her husband to the
towns—she would willingly have stood with him in the streets and the
corn exchanges and sat with him at the inn tables. And if Fan could
have been ten women instead of one, she might have saved Harry Stanhope
from worldly destruction, as Mrs. Polley had rescued her husband and
children. The two women did not resemble each other much in other
respects, and there was little love lost between them. But they shared
at least the helpfulness, command of resources, and capacity for brave
effort and endurance, of the women of the trading classes—the women who
have not been spoilt, and have not lost the instincts of energy and
enterprise, and with it the most distant resemblance to the virtuous
woman in Proverbs. This was part of Fan’s inheritance as a tradesman’s
daughter, which she had neither guessed nor valued as it deserved.

It is a fact established by experience that many women, both widows
and spinsters, have made, when the opportunities offered themselves,
good and successful farmers. Fan was a clever woman apart from
book-learning; she was a woman of strong resolution, and she was
stimulated and braced by every motive which she held dear. If a single
mortal woman could have redeemed Harry Stanhope’s fortunes, she would
have redeemed them.

But the one woman must certainly have been ten, and Fan could
not multiply her identity or render herself ubiquitous. She was
tremendously overweighted—not only by the whole burden and anxiety of
the farm’s being cast upon her, who ought to have been treated as the
weaker vessel, but by the unnerving, despairing suspicion—deepening
every day into hopeless conviction, that an impending wreck of other
than worldly goods was to be faced and wrestled with. Harry was—in what
became always more imminent and hideous danger—of being as speedily and
utterly swamped in tastes, opinions, habits—all that constitute moral
character, as in income and capital. In the dread and horror of that
final downfall, all other falls began to look light.

Fan ceased to pay the smallest heed to the fact that still there came
no recognition of her entrance into the Stanhope family save from
pretty, temporising, meaningless letters written by Agneta. The other
members coolly ignored the intruder. Mrs. Harry Stanhope had no concern
to spare for the consciousness that the little household at Copley
Grange Farm were not keeping their first footing, which had seemed to
be their birthright, among the upper ten of Friarton.

She did not even mind that the Polleys and Dadds grew loud in amazed
pity—in which, at the same time, she believed they revelled, over
her altered circumstances. Mrs. Harry Stanhope was not only reduced
to sending butter, cheese and eggs into the town for sale, she came
herself to the Polleys’ shop and the cheese shop, to square the
accounts which no one else at the farm could make out. Everybody knew
Harry Stanhope had turned out a gentle beggar and purely ornamental. He
could not afford to keep a bailiff to give the orders for which he was
so little prepared that his men continually laughed in their sleeves
at the instructions they received. The mistress of Copley Grange Farm
commanded no more help than she could get from a girl under twenty
in addition to the dairyman to manage the dairy and poultry-yard, on
which it was evident the principal dependence of the farmer must rest.
And did not the old Fan Constable look worn and pulled down, though
she might be proud and ‘game’ to the last, as Mrs. Harry Stanhope? The
truth was that when Fan was from home or in society without Harry, her
eyes had already acquired the fixed, abstracted look of eyes which are
looking beyond their present surroundings, and seeing in the distance
things invisible to her companions. Her ears were constantly on the
alert, strained to catch sounds inaudible to the rest of the party.
While she was taking her share in the conversation or the business
going on about her, there was a perpetual undercurrent of thought
and care in her mind which had no reference to the topics discussed.
She had great self-command, so that she could preserve a double
consciousness, but she was never at ease, never without trouble; and
the unresting worry beneath the calm and smiling surface, showed itself
in a haggard, aging look which was rapidly robbing Fan of all traces of
her youth.

One evening in spring, when the thrushes and blackbirds were
anticipating the nightingales and tuning their ’prentice notes in the
hedges—which had gained the purplish-red bloom, the herald of a flush
of green—over the primroses looking pale and cold in the raw wind of
the March twilight, after the golden shields of the celandines, which
had kept their neighbours company with quite an exuberance of jollity
in the morning sunshine, had collapsed, as early as the afternoon, into
small tightly wrapped-up balls, encased in dim green envelopes, Oliver
was startled by Fan’s walking like a ghost unexpected, unannounced,
and all alone, into the mill-house parlour.

It was too early in the season for evening strolls, and lately Fan
had never been seen abroad without her husband. The same could not be
said of Harry, who was often enough from home without his wife, and
not quite so frequently, but still with tolerably constant recurrence
during the winter, without his brother, whom he had learnt at last
to shake off imperiously. There had come to be an unnatural divorce
between light and shade, and day and night, neither faring well in the
separation. For Harry, all by himself, drove his chariot of the sun,
like another Phaëton, madly, and if he did not set the world on fire,
his own eyes grew scorched and bloodshot, his lips parched, his hands
palsied; the whole goodly springs of his manliness and kindliness were
dried up and polluted with ashes, because of the burden of consuming
fire he had laid hold of and would thenceforth try in vain to guide and
control.

As for Horace, he would slink away like a dog summarily dismissed by
his master, withdraw into his corner to sit moodily there, and only
start up on the distant sound of Harry’s clogged instead of winged
footsteps. Oliver had seen Horace and Fan exchange furtive, miserable
glances when Horace returned thus alone, and drew back into the
greatest gloom which the little drawing-room afforded him. Then the
pair would sedulously pretend to read and work while in reality their
ears were on the stretch, and their hearts on the rack, till far on
into the night. These two knew and trusted each other thoroughly by
this time, though Oliver was certain the looks never passed into words.
Wife and brother remained too loyal in their allegiance.

As Oliver rose hastily to bid Fan welcome, he saw more plainly than
he had yet seen it, and with a sharp pang at the sight, the change in
her looks. A small woman to begin with, she was now little more than
skin and bone. Her brown eyes appeared a sombre black, set in great
shadowy hollows in her white face. The straight firm line of her lips
was drooping and quivering. She put her thin hand in Oliver’s and held
up her face to be kissed, and spoke without any preamble. ‘I am beaten,
Oliver. They say an Englishman never knows when he is beaten, but that
is a man, not a woman. Yet did you ever think I would give in with
life? and I have given in. I have come to you, not to save me—you tried
that once and failed. What did it matter if I might have saved another?
only I have not—there’s the rub. I don’t mind myself, and you need not
mind me. But you must do something. I tell you, Oliver, you must move
heaven and earth to save Harry.’ Her voice rose into a little weak cry.
She was like a creature who had lost all command over herself.

But it was not so much this reversal of natural law in a woman—by
organisation and courage, self-sufficing, self-restrained, rational
and resolute—which smote Oliver Constable with dismay and compunction,
as if he had been the sinner whose sin was at the bottom of this
spectacle, the most pitiable he had ever beheld. It was some
comprehension of what Fan must have suffered, of what it had cost
this woman—ardent and steadfast as women even more than men can prove
themselves—to own herself beaten, to grovel as it were at his knees,
and fling herself for help on him of all men, who, though he had been a
brother in more than name, had interposed with all his might, without
effect, as both of them were well aware, to turn her from the step
which had brought her to this pass.

He remembered having, more than once in their lives, angrily accused
her of being incapable of changing her mind; and—knowing as he had
seemed to know her high spirit, unquenchable energy, and unswerving
determination—he had been tempted to believe, against right reason,
that however mistaken and misplaced her aspirations, or foolish and
baseless her dreams, Fan could not be baffled, and would not be
vanquished.

The end of all was, that she was more thoroughly subdued, presenting
a more deplorable object of contemplation, than if she had been a far
feebler woman.

‘My God!’ cried Oliver in his heart—moved as he was to its depths when
a believing man can but appeal to the Father of his spirit; ‘what must
she not have borne to crush her whole being, lay her pride in the dust,
extinguish the last spark of hope, and break her heart?’

The next moment Oliver was briskly administering to Fan, as most
people in his position, at their wits’ end what to do for the best,
would have administered it, a cold douche—first on the suppliant,
whom he would fain have taken into his arms and sheltered from every
farther blast of the stormy wind which had cast her down bleeding and
powerless, to implore mercy for another and not herself—and next on her
agonised petition.

‘Nonsense, Fan, you are over-wrought, my dear; your nerves are
unstrung; you do not know what you are saying.’

But the time for pulling herself together, struggling to her feet, and
staggering on with the veil drawn decently down again over her torture
and her faintness, was over for Fan. ‘I do know what I am saying,
Oliver,’ she insisted with ashy lips, while the hand which clutched his
arm was trembling like a leaf. ‘You think a wife should not drop the
slightest hint of the skeleton in her closet. I will agree with you
here. And I have not breathed a word to any other human being—not to
Horry, who is his second self—only to you; and do you suppose I could
have spoken to you unless in the last extremity, which has come?’

‘Then rest satisfied with what you have done, Fan; say no more about
it,’ Oliver conjured her, as if he would have put his hand upon her
mouth to keep her from further utterance, or brought down the creeping
dusk to hide their faces from each other. He got up, took several turns
up and down the room, so that he might have his back to her when he
promised solemnly; ‘The devil shall not have Harry, so far as I can
help it.’

That Fan should have come to her brother with such a prayer on her
lips, was only less bad for him than for Fan herself.

Oliver Constable had not the most distant thought that Harry Stanhope
could have grossly ill-treated his wife. Oliver would as soon have
suspected Harry of lifting up his strong right arm to strike down
Horace unresisting under the pacific influence of his devotion. It
is your poor half-brutal coal-heaver who ordinarily adds kicks to
curses, where his wife is concerned. As a rule, though certainly not
without exceptions, centuries of refining civilisation and liberal
education remove Harry’s whole class from committing such outrages.
Harry Stanhope, with his graciousness in an entirely muddled condition,
might challenge a muscular ostler to a round in the noble art of
self-defence. He was known to have taken the law into his own hands and
knocked down a ruffian who was belabouring a child and insulting an old
woman. But he had probably hardly ever spoken a rough word to Fan, whom
he had held in the greatest respect ever since he had known her, though
she had become powerless to make a man of him, as he had proposed. She
was not silly, or bumptious, or trying in any way so as to provoke
the wrath which had originally been a rare experience with Harry. But
not the less he had slain her faith in him, by his hopeless levity
and folly, which were tending unmistakably to animal indulgence and
besotted excess. He had not destroyed one atom of her love—else Fan’s
heart too might have died within her in its cold emptiness, but, at
least, it would not have been wrung with the intolerable pang of loving
him to death and beyond death, yet seeing him go down, in spite of her,
to the place of dragons.

There are students of humanity who positively state that a good man
or woman’s love must inevitably perish with the loss of esteem. If
so, the best human love must be singularly unlike Divine love as it
is revealed to us. And it is one thing voluntarily to give love to a
creature whose repulsive moral disease is evident and undeniable, and
has already penetrated and poisoned the nature through and through—and
quite another to have loved the same creature in the beauty and glory
of sound mortal health, with but the seeds of fatal disease, only to be
detected by the wise physician, lurking in the system, and having once
loved to turn with loathing abhorrence and absolute rejection, from
the sick man, when his weakness has found him out, his sore ancestral
malady has laid fast hold of him, and he is fighting a desperate battle
for life or death.

Not only did Fan’s love cling to Harry in his social and moral decline
still more closely than when she had learned to love him in the heyday
of his natural gifts; even Oliver—who had early taken Harry for what he
was worth, and condemned him to his destiny, now in the teeth of what
he had done to Fan, felt the man’s heart within him turn and soften
with yearning and commiseration for the stripling who was so unequally
matched, and was standing foot to foot, reeling under the shocks
inflicted by a giant adversary and ghastly foe.

Oliver needed this compensation of human tenderness revived and called
forth in the heart of a benevolent man, by human weakness and peril in
its sorriest guise and direst strait, to help to make up to him for
the sacrifice he was called on to offer; since the world had not gone
well with Oliver Constable during these last years, and his own affairs
required the unremitting attention which he saw himself compelled, and
had pledged himself to Fan, to give to those of another.

Oliver had started on his mission impressed with the conviction that
it behoved him especially to make his business prosper, or, if he
could not do that, to prevent its becoming disastrous, in order to
remove the slur thrown liberally on Jacks-of-all-trades, geniuses,
and enthusiasts. He had not the slightest inclination to the modified
martyrdom of commercial losses for their own sake. He decidedly
objected to wasting the money which his father had carefully gathered
that Oliver’s career as a gentleman and scholar might be untrammelled,
even for a good object, if he could prevent it.

On the contrary, it was part of Oliver Constable’s duty, as he
conceived it, to vindicate the truth that the best citizenship and the
best Christianity did not, as a matter of course, conduct a diligent,
prudent, and self-denying tradesman straight into the Bankruptcy Court.

But Oliver was fated to share the lot of most real reformers and
pioneers of the highest civilisation—the only civilisation which is
not merely skin-deep, but which, penetrating to the core, pervades the
whole man, and by the grace of God never leaves him, only departing
when he himself departs, to dwell with him in heavenly habitations—and
of the righteous Gospel which the Lord of Righteousness delivered to be
worked out—not in church or chapel wholly or even principally, but on
such fields as the Rialto of Venice or the London Exchange, the shops
of common tradesmen, the tables where feasts, great and small, are
held, the hearths round which men and women meet to rest from the work
of the day, and cheer their souls.

But Oliver had to discover for himself, in more ways than one, the
pithiness of the proverb that to give a dog an ‘ill name’ is to hang
him, that to run a-muck against popular prejudices is to suffer injury
more or less severe, and wait long for any shadow of a reward.

He had no manner of doubt that the reward of disarming distrust and
establishing a right to success would come in time, if the worker
could but possess his soul in patience, and exercise sufficient faith,
endurance, and bountiful liberality, if he could tarry and lay out,
nothing doubting, fresh materials and pains.

Oliver’s fortitude was not exhausted, but he was sensible he had spent
some of his funds freely, and would soon be living on the verge of his
income, if he did not economise every fraction and dedicate it to its
proper use.

The secession of Jim Hull, with the establishment of his nephew in fine
new baking premises and a fine new business in the town, had diverted
a large slice of the public confidence and custom from what were now
held the _old_ Constable premises and business. The slice was always
increasing in size, and diminishing the original _pièce de résistance_,
from which it had been taken by the shrewdness which proved quite
justified in the anticipation that the public would prefer apparent
purity and actual adulteration, both in the produce of the mill and the
bakehouse, to the uncorrupted but unbleached article.

There was the additional stimulus to the withdrawal of patronage
of a strong spice of malicious satisfaction, not enough to form
a conspiracy, but existing in sufficient abundance for lending
countenance and support, whether sly or bold, to a rival business
conducted on good old-fashioned, rational, give-and-take principles.
Oliver Constable had come among the Friarton shopkeepers uttering
high-flown heresy, witnessing in his conduct against time-honoured
liberties of trade, and stirring up doubts in the bosoms of the very
tradesmen—not to say of their customers. So the Dadd and Polley part
of the community had no objection that Oliver should bear in his own
person the brunt of his Quixotic ideas. Perhaps that would teach him to
pay greater respect to their superior age and experience.

In short, Oliver’s business profits were diminishing so steadily as
to threaten to make his mill and bakehouse eat their own heads, if
he did not diminish in proportion the staffs of millers and bakers—a
step which he objected to take so long as he could afford to hold
out, since it would not only be tantamount to an admission that he was
outmatched, he argued with himself, it would be hard upon the men who
had submitted to his rules and consented to work on his terms—not that
he had altogether overcome the workmen’s opposition. His reputation
had gone abroad as a master full of new-fangled fancies and hobbies,
therefore he had been exposed to the further disadvantage of possessing
a succession of restless, suspicious servants, flighty on their own
account, and inclined to perpetual experiments on, and changes of,
employers.

Then Oliver had been of a mind to show that he would not neglect any
lawful means of improving his flour and bread, so he had set about
introducing expensive new machinery into the mill and bakehouse.
But being, after all, a green hand, without his father’s practical
experience in his double trade, the young man committed several
astounding blunders in the adoption of the machinery, and was much out
of pocket as a punishment for the errors of his ignorance. The result
awoke no small amount of jeering, crowing, and laughter at the leading
tea and supper tables of Friarton.

Oliver’s inner man had not fared better during these three harassing
years. Fan’s house was not a second home to him. The sole effect, so
far as he could see, of his striving to fraternise in the true sense
with the Dadds and the Polleys was that he had succeeded in arousing
in his father’s old allies a hostile and mocking temper, not pleasant
to encounter. Since his quarrel with Jack Dadd, the old Dadds, who
naturally took their son’s part, had fought shy of Oliver Constable;
and he had also, in some manner, he could not for the life of him tell
how, given serious offence to the whole Polley family. He supposed they
were enlisted, with hot, resentful party spirit, or what they mistook
for party spirit, on Jack Dadd’s side. Oliver was half right, half
wrong. For he was incapable of perceiving the other and major ground
of complaint which the Polleys had against him—because, after raising
false expectations, he had stopped short of seeking to keep company
either with ’Liza or one of her sisters, in the prospect of matrimony.

Mrs. Hilliard had never gone so far as to shut her door against Oliver
Constable. Nay, she had been so candid as to admit with pleasure that
her later prognostications with regard to him had been premature, and
in the main erroneous. But Oliver’s chief inducement—as he had come to
acknowledge to himself after there was no further need of crushing it
down—for availing himself of the privilege of visiting at the Meadows,
had vanished from the date of the terrible illness which had seized
on Catherine Hilliard. It was one of the worst of those indefinite,
incalculable, nervous illnesses, bred of the conditions of modern
life, which have no beginning and no end, which baffle by their very
intangibility and paralyse by their unrelaxing clutch, and one of whose
horrors is that in their abnormal character they may develop symptoms
piteously fantastic and grotesque, like the antics of madness. Such
illnesses, dreaded not without cause, are apt, when they spare the
wasted life, to reduce the patient to a state of unrelieved, permanent
prostration and chronic invalidism, which is death in life.

Catherine Hilliard had drifted away from her friends on the misty,
dreary sea of illness which had no shore, till she seemed lost to them
here, till even to Oliver Constable—who now owned to himself, like the
_Bursch_ in the famous _Burschenlied_, that he had loved her always and
would love her throughout eternity—she survived chiefly as the aching,
melancholy thought of the girl who had been capable of dreaming noble
things, but who had not been able to grasp the truth that behind the
commonest, even the most sordid, absolutely repulsive details of human
life, there exist nobler things still than man or woman ever dreamt of
in their highest philosophy.

And the brute creation, which Catherine Hilliard had so loved,
preferring it to the human, drew dumbly and wistfully away from the
decline of her humanity; while the book world in which she had elected
to dwell, crumbled into dust around her. She had left books too behind
her, and the beings that peopled her present existence were more
visionary than the ghosts she had formerly chosen for her company.

Oliver could only look forward to her deliverance from this last
bondage to the unreal, by her entrance on unsealed and everlasting
verities.

Then it was when Oliver was most tempted to regard his enterprise as
a wretched disappointment, he was called on to take up the burden of
another man’s failure.




                             CHAPTER XXVI.

             THE PRICE AT WHICH HARRY STANHOPE WAS RESCUED.


The first thing to be done for Harry Stanhope was to get him out of
the situation for which he was utterly unfit, into which he had thrust
himself—to extricate him from the network of idleness, false activity,
unsuitable companionship, debt, and dissipation in which he was
entangled. In some respects the feat was not only practicable, it was
comparatively easy. Harry had proved himself so thoroughly incapable
a farmer, that it was not likely any sane landlord would be urgent to
keep this tenant, particularly as his slender funds and a part of his
wife’s portion were already flung to the winds, or rather sunk in the
soil, and he had no more left to deposit in the land even if that had
been his sole mode of spending money.

Old Peter Constable had believed in women’s power of standing alone,
and had left Fan absolutely mistress of her portion. Oliver had
braved her indignation by asking her to have it settled on herself
before her marriage. And certainly Harry Stanhope had not opposed the
arrangement, for Harry was truly convinced of the treasure Fan was
in herself, as well as habitually careless of pounds, shillings, and
pence. Therefore, though he talked the jargon of his set—to Horace and
others, and professed, as a claim to being a man of the world, not to
be indifferent to tin—to the degree of counting on a woman’s goods
to eke out his resources, he did not really put much weight on Fan’s
bank-book and coupons, or mind whether she kept them in her own hands
or put them into his.

In the end, Fan, more as a means of vindicating Harry’s
disinterestedness than as a precaution for her own independence in days
to come, allowed half of her portion to be tied up for her personal use
if she should so ordain it. She would gladly have given up to Harry
every shilling of this reserve, after he had disposed of the rest,
had it not been that her foresight for him was not to say infinitely
greater than his for himself or for her, but for any she could have
exercised on her own account. Harry had become to his wife, in all
worldly respects, like one of those minors or infants in the eyes of
the law, with regard to whom it is his protector’s duty to defend him
from the dangers of his own helplessness and to hedge him round with
artificial barriers. Still Fan was eminently an upright woman, and she
would have fought against her despair and nerved herself to strip—not
herself alone but Harry, of her remaining possessions, in order to
discharge the debts which he had contrived to incur in spite of her,
rather than let them fall upon her brother, if she had not known that
even supposing she could get Oliver to forego what all concerned in it
called his ‘loans,’ it would only be a form. It could not prevent him
from being impoverished in the long run, because it must be on Oliver
the little family at Copley Grange Farm would have to depend, till its
mistress was strong enough, if she ever were strong again, to struggle
to secure independence—not merely for herself and Harry, but for Horace
whose oars were shipped in Harry’s boat.

There was no difficulty on Harry’s side; he had never been overburdened
with scruples, and he hardly suffered from any in accepting Oliver
Constable’s interposition to free him—Harry, from his mess at Oliver’s
cost. For indubitably there were money penalties, the extent of
which even Fan did not guess, to pay all round, before the volunteer
yeoman-farmer could be withdrawn from the ranks of the yeomen,
released from the obligations of his lease, and granted a discharge
by his creditors, while it was Oliver who, in each instance, paid the
defalcation.

Oliver did not grudge it so much when he found that Harry, sick of
the whole concern, readily consented to go abroad at once with his
wife, brother, and brother-in-law—who appreciated the concession
and was conscious of a lurking sweetness and graciousness in his
unstable prodigal’s freedom from resentment at the old sap and grinder
Constable’s interference and assumption, however carefully masked, or
however dearly bought, of the reins of government.

Yet, after all, paradoxical as it may sound, dogged resistance would
most assuredly have promised better than unconditional submission for
Harry’s ultimate attainment of moral manhood.

‘Charity begins at home,’ Oliver told himself, using the proverb in
a sense which satisfied him, when he reckoned up the damage to his
own prospects, of leaving the mill and bakehouse in the charge of a
dolt like Ned Green, and a foreman thirty years younger and a whole
century less acute and discreet than Jim Hull. ‘I have always desired
to be kept from developing into a monster, made up of theories like
Maximilian Robespierre,’ he assured himself farther, with a faint
smile; ‘and no doubt it is the finest thing which can happen to
me—myself, to be forced to skedaddle across the Channel, and potter
about foreign towns with Fan and her small family. It will knock the
starch out of me in no time, and take me down ever so many pegs in my
priggishness.’

The sum of Oliver’s project for the Stanhopes, in the meantime, was
to cut off Harry from his moorings and their tendencies, to furnish
him with the substitutes of movement and variety, to afford Fan the
change, rest, and recruiting of which she was sorely in need, till
something more effectual should be devised to rebuild the ruined home,
and replace the lost opportunities. It was a humble enough programme,
not very interesting and exciting, save for the main thread of the
drama, on which all the rest hung, and on which the performers were
shamefacedly silent.

Most people have experienced the peculiar fascination and absorption
which is caused by dangerous illness in a family, when the whole
interests of life centre in the sick-room and its bulletins. All
outside matters, though they might formerly have been regarded as of
vital moment, dwindle into insignificance, until the wide world with
its empires and peoples, tottering republics and falling thrones, and
nations wresting their liberties at the expense of bloody battles in
which men by thousands perish uncounted, scarcely noticed—are blotted
out for the time by a few feet of flooring and ceiling, a single bed,
one figure lying still with half-closed eyes and half-parted lips,
faintly beating heart and fluttering breath.

Harry Stanhope had acquired, as his companions knew, the taint of a
grievous disease, half physical, half spiritual, which may rank with
the plague and cholera among moral maladies. So to watch stealthily
his symptoms, note the changes in his state, chronicle with trembling
hope his progress in throwing off the deeply injected poison, or to
recognise with sinking heart its fresh outbreak and farther spread
through the system, laid hold upon and monopolised the thoughts of the
little party of which Harry was the half-unconscious sick man, till
he engrossed them more and more, as the combat thickened, and final
victory or defeat drew nearer and nearer.

Sometimes Harry would rise so far above his ailment as to lose the
worst of the disfiguring traces which it was stamping on his outer
man. He would be for days and weeks together the easily entertained,
contented, manly lad of the past. He would be as simple and pleasant as
an unspoilt schoolboy, as charmed to go or stay with Fan as in the days
of their courtship, as united to Horry as when the brothers were loving
children, as satisfied with chaffing Constable, and proving the life of
his own circle, where animal spirits were in request, as if there did
not exist for him more highly-flavoured attractions, more enthralling
society—a coarse and powerful supplementary source of excitement.

In these moods, when Harry was restored to his right mind, he
was—without a grain of hypocrisy, so frank and free, so irresistibly
helpful to children and old people, so easily served by servants, that
he won, without fail, the heart of every stranger with whom he came in
contact. He was the charming fellow-traveller, at each _table-d’hôte_
and in every steamboat and railway carriage, of hosts of unknown
travellers, native and foreign. Harry was the great social conductor
and bond of union between the whirling world around him and the rest of
his party, who smiled cheerfully, and accepted with gay grumbling their
share of the plague of his popularity.

Then such a transformation came over the patient that clear brow and
eyes, broad shoulders, active hands and feet and tongue grew as if
they belonged to an entirely different person. Here was a man in the
toils of raging fever, and possessed by its delusions, with the load
of a nameless unbearable oppression on his lowering forehead, the
gleam of a strange fire in his burning eyes, having his head bent, and
his back slouched with the gait of an incorrigible vagabond, who must
escape from the most sacred bonds and solemn obligations, and carry
a distracted spirit ill at ease, and which cannot rest, into kindred
storm and darkness. Why, the very muscular hands were straining and
quivering to clutch the deadly foe, bound to overthrow the victim in
the hateful encounter; the swift feet were stumbling in their frenzied
haste to reach the goal from which there is seldom a return; the
tongue spoke winning words no more, but stammered with the language of
unreasoning fury and aimless invective.

When the demon of his craving for strong drink leaped upon Harry and
held him, he broke from every other detaining grasp. It was to no
purpose that Fan, Horace, and Oliver put force on their inclinations
in order to go with desperate perseverance on the endless round of
theatres, public gardens, and concerts, as if the travellers had been
so many schoolboys abroad for their holidays, or as if individual
tastes and domestic habits were unknown to the party. Harry would not
suffer Fan by his side; he shook off his brother and Oliver. He quitted
them, and defied them to follow him, or he fled from them and outsped
them by the terrible strength and subtlety of his madness. They lost
him for intervals of hours, increasing to days and even weeks. The
journeyings of the party came to an abrupt stop; all their previous
arrangements were upset.

Fan and Horry, with Oliver added as a third to the group, looked at
each other, on the first sign of the repetition of the miserable
scenes, as the two had looked in the familiar farmhouse at home.

Sometimes Fan sat alone in the strange hotel room listening to the
careless coming and going of the other travellers; through the long
hours from sunset to darkness and the white glimmering dawn, while
Horace and Oliver, going different ways, hunted through all the
_places_ and _markets_; the hotels and cafés—conspicuous or obscure—the
houses of entertainment where questionable hosts received strangers
more likely to prove thieves than angels taken in unawares—the hunters
studiously keeping themselves, as far as they might, unseen, till they
stalked their prey. Thrice happy for all if it had been the beast of
the field, and not merely a creature made in the image of God, degraded
into a condition lower than that of the brutes, over which he had
been ordained lord and king. A horse or a dog would have been wiser
than Harry Stanhope, and would have guided him with advantage, in the
circumstances. Or it might be the man-stalkers returned, with reluctant
feet, empty hands, and hanging heads, to the hapless woman condemned to
sit and wait in vain.

In these altered times, Harry, who was so fond of his kind, constituted
the great insurmountable obstacle to any genial fraternisation between
his family and other travelling parties who were in the wholesome odour
of unsullied respectability and the vigour and gladness of moral health
and strength. He condemned his companions—not simply to a tedious and
irritating quarantine, but to a sad and chilling isolation, as they
drew away from their neighbours to hide their wound and its humiliating
cause under a tightly grasped mantle, which must never be thrown open.

The isolation served only to draw the group more closely together, and
to engage them, with still greater usurpation of their faculties, in
their deeply human office, till Oliver became well-nigh as wrapped up
as Fan and Horace were, in that vocation of nurse and brother’s keeper,
which—whether it be of the body or the soul—passes with practice into
the most enticing and devouring of pursuits. Witness how it lures its
recruits from the brightest and most peaceful quarters, and holds its
brave soldiers fast, resisting all remonstrance, till they drop at
their posts in dens of squalor and misery.

Time and place ceased largely to exert their power over persons bound
up in one man’s fortunes in a prolonged and terrible single combat.

What difference did the varying seasons make, when spring stole on
to summer, and summer glided into autumn, and autumn stiffened and
froze into winter, if yet there was no sure amendment or certain
decline in Harry Stanhope’s condition? What did it matter whether the
battle-ground were the heaths of Brittany, the stony vineyards of
Burgundy, the fat pastures of Guelderland, the forests of Flanders, the
olive and orange gardens wet with the spray of the Mediterranean in the
Riviera; or whether the towns offered to the visitors the picturesque
gables and roofs of Bruges or Nüremberg, the palaces of Genoa, or the
churches of Venice, when the question still was Harry and Harry only?
How long was it since there had been an outbreak of his mania? Was he
steadier this month than last? Was there any hope left?

It is not merely religious, or what many would call fanatical, people
who are brought to comprehend the sorrowful wonder of the demand, ‘What
shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
soul?’ For the fate of a soul even here in the light of goodness and
loyal obedience to God’s laws, or of turbulent rebellion against them,
with all future honour and happiness, or all future disgrace and misery
at stake—be it in the case of a not overwise lad like Harry Stanhope—is
really of greater moment and of more intense interest to kindred
humanity, than all the natural beauties and all the acted out history
of the universe. Place a drowning man in juxtaposition with the finest,
most suggestive landscape in the world, and what spectator—not to speak
of the unhappy mortal’s familiar friends, would not—conscious of his
fellow-creature’s strait—turn his back on senseless matter and the dead
past? Unless, indeed, the looker-on were morally dwarfed, distorted,
and hardened almost beyond recognition by his kind crying shame on him,
with honest disgust for his unnatural conduct, he would watch, if he
could do no more, with a sympathetic agony of eagerness, the hard fight
for life of his perishing brother—how he clutched desperately each
bough and every twig in his path,—how he struck out gallantly for a
space till he was well-nigh beyond the engulphing wave,—how he faltered
and gave way, and was sucked back into the insatiable jaws of the
overmastering tide.

The Stanhopes, with Oliver in their company, went on like the wandering
Jew, as if there were no end to their wandering, no rest for the soles
of their feet. They lived their own throbbing, high-strung family life,
till other lives beyond theirs looked distant, pale, and dim, like
lives in dreams. Tidings from the old home came to the wayfarers, and
did not move them, or only awoke in them dull or fitful responses. A
bachelor uncle of Harry and Horace Stanhope’s died, and, with some
dawning suspicion in his last days that he had left his brother’s
orphan boys very much to sink or swim as they could, sought to
anticipate the moment of reckoning by an act of atonement. He chose to
bequeath the sum of eight thousand pounds—the bulk of his savings in a
colonial office—to the poor relations whom he had shunned and ignored
as much as he could, in the course of their previous existence, instead
of to the well-to-do flesh and blood whom he had hitherto exclusively
cultivated.

The timely legacy—together with what was left of Fan’s means, would
form a little competence for the Stanhopes, if they made up their minds
to settle in some quiet way abroad.

The subject scarcely struck any of the pilgrims in this light. Would
it not rather deal the death-stroke to Harry by supplying him with
independent funds, other than his wife’s, for squandering and riot?

‘Poor old uncle Geof!’ said the man on his trial, with an impulse of
his native kindliness; ‘to think he should be gone, and to cut up
well for us, after all! For at least this legacy, though it ain’t
much,’ continued Harry with a mixture of earnestness and candour,
condescension and defiance peculiar to him, ‘ain’t too little for some
enjoyment, without Fan and the rest of you looking glum. Come on,
Horry; we’ll pay all respect to the old boy and his tin, by drinking
to his memory to begin with, and then we’ll do whatever else enters
our heads, to drive dull care away. Nobody can reasonably expect two
fellows who have succeeded to a small fortune—and the smaller it is the
less self-denial is to be looked for—to abstain from a glorification
or two. But we’ll save enough to make you a handsome present, Fan,
never fear. As for Constable, he’s like the man in history, beyond
being bought.’

Agneta wrote—to her brothers this time, to tell them of her approaching
marriage, with the full approbation of her guardians, to Mr. Amyott
of Copley Grange—of all men, the widower approaching middle age, the
father of two or three girls, the biggest already higher than the
writer’s elbow.

‘Aggie a stepmother! Why doesn’t she go in for being a grandmother
at once?’ cried Harry, as his single derisive comment on an incident
which, since it barely touched him, did not deserve more serious
consideration.

‘Ah! she was always fond of Copley Grange,’ said Fan, with quick,
womanly extenuation, as if it had been the manor-house and the squire
that Agneta had known and prized. ‘But she is taking a great many
duties and cares upon her at once, which seems a pity, when one thinks
how many more must come in the course of nature,’ ended Fan in assumed
matter-of-factness, and in the languor which had replaced her old fire.
But she began again a moment afterwards. ‘It is not fair to herself and
to what ought to have been her natural obligations.’ Fan spoke now with
something of her former suppressed ardour and inextinguishable passion
for justice; but tears of weakness gathered in her eyes at the same
time. She was not thinking of Agneta’s future alone, but of the future
of others with claims on their sister, which Fan, in the days of her
strength, would have been the last to urge, and which Agneta appeared
deliberately disqualifying herself from ever fulfilling.

‘Heaven help us! I think we are not very cordial in our
congratulations,’ exclaimed Oliver impatiently. He was pricked by the
troubled consciousness that the cares as well as the pleasures of this
life—the cares which are not of our seeking and which certainly do not
contribute to our ease and satisfaction, are in danger of choking the
good seed of generous thoughts and magnanimous judgments. ‘Can’t we
wish Miss Stanhope and Mr. Amyott joy, without spotting all the real or
imaginary disadvantages in their connection, and collaring the couple
with the double chains of fulfilled and neglected requirements?’

A new idea was tickling Harry. ‘Look here, Horry; if we had stayed in
the Farm we should have been Aggie’s tenants—bound to take off our hats
to her. We might even have yoked ourselves into the carriage which
brought her and her blooming bridegroom home from their marriage-tour.
I wonder if she would have had an extra barrel of beer broached for my
benefit? She has some small notion of the depth of my thirst. Wouldn’t
it have been jolly? By Jove! we’ve spoilt an interesting episode for
the county paper. “Charming tableau of attached relations forgetting
the accidental diversities of rank and fortune and rushing into each
other’s arms.” Don’t frown, Fan, my love; you would not have been
called on to drag Aggie up the drive hooraying for our master and
mistress. You would have sat at ease, over the way, and witnessed the
gala from a respectful distance.’

‘If it is any gratification to you to talk nonsense, Harry, why then,
do it,’ said Fan, with a lingering reflection of her old girlish
dignity, in the middle of her womanly pain at his want of comprehension
and feeling, and yet with the pathetic indulgence to every defect in
the man she loved, which far transcended both dignity and pain.

Oliver knew he was still capable of quite another form of selfishness,
when a letter from Mrs. Hilliard reached Fan. Mrs. Hilliard would
not consent to lose sight of her kindred in exile, any more than
when settled in a mill and bakehouse at her door. She had no further
occasion, indeed, to acknowledge Fan’s triumph and pay it homage, but
the eventual defeat of Mrs. Hilliard’s enemy was disarming in another
way. Mrs. Hilliard was interested to learn what farther reversal of
parts might occur among her cousins; and whether poor dear Harry
Stanhope was to prove the reprobate out and out, as she rather feared
would be the end. But nobody could help it save himself, he was the
sole person to blame. It was Philistinish of the Constables to throw
themselves into the breach, and make such a fuss about what was so
likely to happen. It would have been far better for everybody to
have hushed it up, to have put poor Harry and his drag of a brother
quietly out of the way—not by murder, which might have had unpleasant
consequences, but by banishment for life, while Fan came home to her
brother. But these cousins of Mrs. Hilliard’s were not like anybody
else, and would not behave like rational people in the common lot of
having a prodigal among them.

Mrs. Hilliard’s letter was not purely inquisitive; she was really
softened by the news she had to tell, though she told it in her own
manner. Her cousin Catherine was better. She had surmounted the crisis
of her illness, and she was not only to live and be well again, she
was about to turn over a new leaf—in short, to go a-head and look
alive for the rest of her days. Mrs. Hilliard flattered herself
_that_ would astonish her readers. The miracle had been worked by the
new order of nurse whom the London physician had brought down just
in time to their assistance. It had been during the very dismallest
part of Catherine’s illness, when Mrs. Hilliard’s sole refuge from
the blues on her own account, had been in the anticipation of the
inconsistencies and incongruities she was to encounter in the latest
specimen of nurse—who is no longer a Sairey Gamp but a beneficent
princess in disguise. Now beneficent princesses are charming to think
of, but naturally one would suppose they are not the easiest persons to
accommodate and entertain. Mrs. Hilliard had, therefore, proposed to
lay all the house under contribution for the Sister’s benefit. She had
told off her own maid in the stranger’s service. The maid’s mistress
had even had some idea of converting herself into an abigail, that
she might more fittingly hold pins for her social superior, who was
condescending to attend on Catherine. Mrs. Hilliard had arranged levees
of all the ladies in Friarton to be held in the Meadows’ drawing-room
in honour of the Sister when she was off duty and open to recreation;
and sure enough the Sister had turned out to be a daughter of the
old lord-lieutenant’s, the county belle of ten years ago; but she
had laughed to scorn the words ‘accommodation,’ ‘entertainment,’ and
‘homage.’

She had perversely chosen and doggedly stuck to a housemaid’s bedroom,
because it was nearest to Catherine’s room. She had insisted on putting
in for herself the few pins which her holland gown required. She was
so enlivened by her work in the sick-room that she came out of it
looking as fresh as a daisy and as gay as a lark. When she had an hour
to spare, or wanted a little variety, she took it in running about the
town to rout out sickness among the miserable wretches who could not
afford a nurse of any kind, and then in seeking to trace the mischief
to its origin and destroy its sheet anchors of poverty and dirt. She
had caused the two doctors’ hair to stand on end, forced the vicar to
tear what hair was left on his head, and all but driven the youngest
and most enthusiastic of the curates to hang himself. In fine, the
Sister had imparted to Mrs. Hilliard the remarkable information that
she looked on this apparently lowest department of her profession as
in fact the highest, and had been guilty of selecting it for herself.
She had only consented to come down and nurse so swell a patient as
Catherine because she was in extremity, and because the Sister had some
special acquaintance with nervous disorders and skill in treating them.

Catherine had opened her eyes at the princess in disguise, of course
penetrating the disguise, from the first moment she saw her. The sick
woman had come under the spell of the nurse’s vitality until everybody
who could make a diagnosis said the one craze would cast out the other,
the craze of work would expel the craze of lethargy, the craze of
social regeneration would break the back of individual despondency and
despair. Thus Mrs. Hilliard wrote, and Oliver was free to think over
the news.

Catherine alive, in health, awakened from her long unhealthy sleep
with its haunting nightmares! Catherine loosed from her grave-clothes!
Catherine informed of the riches of life, stretching out her hands to
take them for herself and share them with others! If he could but see
and speak with Catherine now, would she not understand him, and feel
with him at last, whatever came of it?

But to see Catherine, with whom all was well, Oliver must abandon Fan
in her tribulation, when, in the light of a fresh trial hanging over
her, she had more need of his help than ever.

Oliver could not find it in his heart to quit his post under such
conditions, though it was also in his heart to writhe and fret at
what might have been, and the possible forfeiture of his own chance
of human happiness. But he was also capable of feeling thankful that
it was—as he had every reason to believe—only his own happiness, not
Catherine’s—above all, not her well-being, which might be at stake.
He was not put to the torture of having to choose between Fan and
Catherine in this supreme sense.




                             CHAPTER XXVII.

                          THE LAST PENNY PAID.


The end came, as it often does after long anxiety, when least expected.
The travelling party had been under the necessity of staying their
wanderings and pitching their tent for a longer season than usual.
For many reasons the leaders had chosen one of the loveliest and most
admired scenes in Europe for their temporary resting place. It was
early summer again, so that the Stanhopes might resort to a mountain
and lake district where the air braced every nerve, and which afforded
opportunity for feats of climbing and boating, to attract and occupy
that member of the family whose delectation and employment were always
the first cares, while the weary might rest in preparation for a fresh
campaign.

The lake of the four cantons lay shimmering in its beauty,
peacock-green or blue-black in tint as it happened to be in light or in
shade. Great walnut-trees grew by its margin, and dipped their branches
in its waters, while the most stunted pines ceased to flourish on the
bare short grass or the rocky summits of its giant guardians. There
were lower mountains that would have been well-grown mountains anywhere
else, which rose sheer from the lake, and were clothed with waving
wood from the soles of their feet to the crown of their heads; but one
forgot them in the near presence of the bald Rhigi and the desolate
Pilatus and the remoter vision of the blue range of the Engelberg
seamed and tracked with everlasting snows.

The little burgher town, so grandly framed, was not altogether
smoothed down from its ancient ruggedness and picturesqueness into
modern commonplace uniformity, or, still worse, smartness. True, its
great hotels, with bands of music for evening promenaders, were trying
to the sensitive visitor, and its shops with their staple of carved
wood, however pretty, and verging here and there on art proper, were
not without their objections. But there was something to be said for
the old covered rickety bridges over the pale green water, with the
rude representations of the grotesque horrors of the Dance of Death;
the Water Tower; the bold rough rendering on the face of the rock of
the great sculptor’s idea of the lion of Switzerland, wounded to death,
its paw still defending the broken lily of France.

Apart from a Babel of tongues, in which English prevailed, and swarms
of motley tourists with the Rhigi railway as the scientific means to
the desired end of attaining a region so strange in giddy height and
width of view, so familiar by the descriptions and raptures of its
crowds of admirers—and those inevitable attributes of Lucerne, were not
very conspicuous in the early summer when the Stanhopes occupied their
quarters—there were two distinct, even discordant, associations sharing
the ground between them. There were the more vivid and recent traces
of what all well-instructed, incredulous people now call the myth of
William Tell—the national hero whose imaginary personality struck the
first blow in breaking the fetters—doubtless as fabulous as the rest—of
his country. Certainly, the common representation of him in a stage
kilt, theatrically administering the oath of allegiance to his equally
fantastic fellow-conspirators, as it figured in cheap photographs, was
not calculated to inspire faith in his identity.

There was also the mediæval legend which, in its wild superstition,
belonged to all Christendom, of the unrighteous judge who falsely
condemned, not his lord and king alone, but the King of kings and the
Saviour of men. And there was not found any place for repentance,
in men’s horrified minds, for this traitor any more than for the
arch-traitor. Pontius Pilate was doomed for ever to hide his white,
conscience-stricken face, and wring his accursed, palsied hands with
a feeble show of washing away the innocent blood from which no holy
baptism of water could cleanse them.

Constantly as the sun rose or set on the glorious world of mountain
peaks, wood, and water, these two idealised memories awoke and rose in
conflict, glimmering through the white mists of morning, or brooding
under the purple vault of night—the honest, brave Swiss freeman who
bade all Swiss slaves go free—the falsehearted Roman coward who saw no
evil in this man, and yet delivered up the Deliverer of the World into
the hands of his deadly foes to do with Him what they would.

At Lucerne, Fan’s baby was born. To the mother her little daughter came
as an angel from heaven, promising her a fresh paradise instead of the
old, which had turned out but a waste howling wilderness with green
oases here and there.

To the father the child brought the delight of a new toy with which he
might play joyously for a while, and then, without thinking, break it.
Harry had none of the trembling reverence, and clumsy awkwardness, in
the middle of their tenderness, which some inexperienced fathers betray
on their first introduction to their offspring. Harry took his infant
daughter in his arms without hesitation and dandled her like an expert
at once. The nurse and all who saw his performance cried out he was the
most charmingly fatherly young father who had ever been beheld.

To her Uncle Horace, the last arrival was simply a fresh possession of
Harry’s, a ‘rum’ and funny possession, with which the bachelor uncle
was chary in having much to do, and that inflicted on him sundry spasms
of bashfulness, but of which on the whole he did not disapprove.

As for Oliver, ‘the little woman’ made him more inclined to thank God
and take courage. She was a tiny, weak weapon which might yet prove
all-powerful in casting down strongholds and overthrowing a foul god,
even the jovial Bacchus of Greek worship, which, seen near, was hideous
as Dagon and cruel as Moloch.

But there came a speedy interruption to Fan’s recovery. Harry, whom her
danger and weakness, together with the gift she had made him, subdued
for the moment, was devoted to her in those days. He was sitting by her
sofa, when she started up, and fixing on him eyes full of the craving
care of an inappeasable anxiety, amazed and alarmed even Harry, who
hardly knew what mental apprehension, any more than physical fear,
meant, by the eager inquiry, ‘Where’s Harry?’

He hastened to soothe her by the assurance of his presence, without
effect. He cried aloud, as he quailed before the blank non-recognition,
and impatient denial of the glance which met his imploring looks, for
Horry—Constable—any witness to convince Fan that here was Harry by her
side.

The witnesses came quickly, and she knew each of them—down to the nurse
who had been an utter stranger to her till within the last few weeks;
but she did not know her husband, and she would not believe what the
others said of his being himself, and of his standing in the room, the
nearest of all to her, bending over her, clasping her hand. ‘Where’s
Harry?’ she continued to demand with terrible, heart-rending insistance.

The long strain had snapped the strings of the fine instrument at last.
She cried for Harry day and night, in his sight and hearing. As she
cried she broke the silence which she had only once before stirred in
order to claim succour for him; she poured forth in full measure her
incalculable sufferings. She lived over again to one appalled auditor
the long nights when she had sat listening for a footstep which never
came, but was replaced by other footsteps, each, in its turn, causing
her heart to bound with unwarrantable expectation, and sink in the
sickness—growing always deadlier, of hope deferred; till it seemed as
if all the footsteps which approached and departed in ignorance and
indifference, trod, deliberately and mercilessly, over her quivering
heart, spurning it as they passed. She showed how the truest woman
in the world had been fain to impose upon herself with miserable
deceptions, before she had confessed, in the secrecy of her own soul,
that the fine gold of her idol was only base clay under its lacquer—how
the most straightforward and sincere of human beings had been driven to
play at the wretched game of keeping up appearances, of laying herself
out to hoodwink her neighbors. She had been humbled in the dust as well
as worn out by ceaseless struggles, and tortured to frenzy. Her sleep
had gone from her eyes. Peace had been unknown to her—a God-fearing,
Christ-loving woman.

The revelation was like the opening of those Books before which every
son of man will smite his breast and call on the mountains to fall upon
him and the hills to cover him. And Harry Stanhope’s accuser, day and
night, before God and his brethren, was the woman who loved him best,
and would sooner have bitten her tongue out than said the lightest word
to blame him.

Every effort was made to withdraw Harry from the awful, ghastly
ordeal. The instant Horace guessed instinctively what Fan was speaking
of incessantly in the monotonous voice as tuneless as his own, which
he could no longer catch so as to distinguish the words, he started
forward with fury, as if he were mad himself, to drag Harry away; but
Harry shook his brother off.

Oliver laid a firm hand on Harry’s shoulder, but from that, too, Harry
freed himself. ‘Let me alone, Constable,’ he gasped. ‘My place is by my
wife, and whatever I have done or left undone, I will stay with her and
hear the last she has to say to me.’

None could dispute his right, and the men drew back; but there were
still women’s pitiful voices beseeching him to have mercy on himself.
‘Go away, sir, for Heaven’s sake—for her sake. She does not mean it;
she does not know what she is saying. Your staying will do no good.’

But Harry would not listen to the entreaties, and in the end he heard
no voice save Fan’s. He stood there till her tale of martyrdom was
burnt in and branded on his conscience. Under the operation his face
did not grow sharp as Fan’s sharpened, neither did his fair hair betray
patches of grey, as her dark hair betrayed when it was pushed aside
that the death-sweat might be wiped from her temples. Yet his whole
aspect underwent such a change as it was hardly possible he could
entirely lose, so as to become the same that he had been before. He
grew perceptibly older-looking in those days which could be so easily
counted, with the sudden stamp of ripening to withering, which rapid,
mortal illness sometimes impresses even on an infant’s face.

He had never before willingly encountered what was painful either to
his senses or his sensibility. He had always selected the paths which
were easiest and most agreeable to himself, without too much regard
to their going down hill. They had brought him to where the battle
raged hottest in the Valley of the Shadow of Death; and though it was
not himself, but another, who was slain—the fumes of the smoke, the
clatter of the strife, the deep wounds, the flowing life-blood, the
gloom of that valley of shadows, were not likely to depart utterly from
his consciousness, and leave him in the light-hearted, light-headed
carelessness, the hard, untempered blaze of sunshine, of his former
experience.

Fan had forgotten her baby in that last whirl of the tempest which
swept her away, but she remembered it in the end. In the pouring out of
her tribulation without restraint, she had constantly called on Horace
and Oliver to help Harry, who stood nailed to the ground there by her
pillow. Then, when her voice was sinking into an indistinguishable
murmur, and her hands letting go every earthly hold, she felt
gropingly for her child, and struggled to utter another sentence
audibly. She did not speak for the child with her passing breath as
so many mothers have spoken for their children. Fan’s care for Harry
had swallowed up her care for their child. She spoke to the unheeding,
unconscious infant who for many a long year would be a helpless human
being, needing tender fostering and watchful protection, and instead of
recommending the child to the father, in the bewilderment of poor Fan’s
unapproachable fidelity to Harry, she recommended the father to the
child. ‘Baby, take care of Harry,’ she managed to say, and with a few
more fluttering breaths, died. The words of Fan’s final, fond, foolish
injunction were still ringing in Harry’s ears when he staggered out of
the room.




                            CHAPTER XXVIII.

                            OLIVER’S RETURN.


Death, and not marriage, wipes out offences, clears scores, and opens
the bolts and bars of shut hearts a little, for a brief space. Harry
Stanhope’s relations mostly wrote to condole with the young widower
on the death of the wife whom they had never countenanced. Lord Mount
Mallow—after all, only a connection by marriage, who happened to be
then disporting himself in the playground of Europe, actually offered
to defer climbing a mountain and come out of his way to grace Fan’s
funeral.

Agneta Amyott wrote impulsively, instead of penning a letter in which,
while the proprieties were well preserved, the writer committed herself
to nothing. She was deeply grieved, not merely for her dear old Harry,
but for her dear sister, her former kind friend, whom Agneta declared
she would now give half the world to be able to see, if but once again.
And what about the darling little baby? What could three young men make
of such a charge? It was deplorable to think of it. Would Harry let her
send a trustworthy person to fetch the baby, now that she had a home
of her own to receive it in? There were the little Amyotts’ nurse and
nurseries all ready. She had not been able to speak to her husband yet,
but she felt certain Mr. Amyott would not object. To be sure, the close
of Agneta’s letter, in which there was the first note of hesitation,
sounded more natural than the beginning.

Harry rejected each overture not so much bitterly or pettishly, as with
the first sternness and obduracy which had ever burst up through his
constitutional softness and irrepressible buoyancy. ‘Nobody shall mourn
for Fan but the real mourners—you, Horry, and Constable and me.

‘Fan’s baby shall not be taken out of charity into the house of any
man—or woman either. She shall not be brought up as we were, if I can
help it.’

Fan’s baby succeeded to what was left of her mother’s little fortune;
she might also have the reversion of what Harry and Horace could keep
of their legacy. In the meantime she was not given over to the tender
mercies of three ignorant men, though, even if she had, she might have
fared worse. There was not a woman, high or low, in the Swiss hotel in
which she had been born, who was not interested in the small specimen
of humanity, and there was one woman—a hard-working clergyman’s
hard-working wife, loitering and rather pining abroad while doing her
best to get rid of the lagging, idle weeks of her husband’s necessary
holiday—who pounced upon the motherless baby as a windfall, or rather,
as she would have called it, a Godsend.

Oliver had not been greatly attracted previously to these reverent
Weatherleys, in any chance intercourse which he had held with them. He
had respected them as very worthy people, but they had seemed to him,
what they were, somewhat fanatical and narrow in their views. As for
Harry Stanhope, no two persons could have been more widely removed from
what he had proved hitherto, or could have possessed less in common
with his past, than the strongly professional as well as pious couple
who were taking, but scarcely enjoying, a compulsory breathing space in
their toiling life.

But from the moment that Mrs. Weatherley’s motherliness appropriated
the care of Fan’s baby, Harry, as it were, instinctively—with another
of his instincts of self-preservation probably—took to her and clung
to her and her husband in his misery, with a pathetic dependence and
trust, to which they were not slow to respond.

Indeed, Harry’s remorse from an early stage assumed the form of
contriteness rather than despair, his natural humility and amiability
standing him in good stead here. Fan had willed his rescue from folly
and evil with her whole devoted heart, and though he would never now
have the consolation—the positive gladness, of proving to her that he
was a rescued man, and so, of more than making up to her, in her love,
for all the anguish he had cost her, he was still, in his present mood,
eager to do what Fan had wished, to be as she had chosen for him, in
his best interests. He trusted brokenly that it might atone—if it were
only to her memory, that Fan might know he was sorry and was pulling
himself up, somehow, sometime—that Fan’s God and his would accept and
confirm the late repentance in the great redemption He has provided for
sinners.

Poor Harry had never been proud, and he was not afflicted with
the insane egotism which sees in its possessor an object of such
consequence in the universe, to his Maker no less than to himself, that
he must needs interfere with the working of human and divine love.
Such a one-sided reasoner will hold, against every assurance to the
contrary, that he has sinned beyond forgiveness, and it is too late
for him to repent and think better of it. In fact, there is a false
Mephistopheles dignity and subtle compensation in this conclusion, when
shame, regret, and grief still take the attitude of resentful defiance.

But it was not so with Harry, not even in his way of regarding his
baby. He did not turn from it, in the beginning, with the blind
repugnance and unreasoning, unrighteous grudge, with which some
widowers are tempted to regard the child that has cost its mother her
life. Certainly it was not her child, but her husband, who had killed
Fan. Yet Harry might have been so far dishonest as to have given a sop
to his conscience, by shifting a part of the responsibility and blame
on the innocent child. He might have taken a cruel satisfaction in
revenging Fan, by trampling alike on his own natural affections, and on
the just claims of his infant daughter.

But Harry never did so. He seemed rather to transfer at once to the
baby all the fondness for the mother which was thrown back on his
hands, when she was taken from him. In addition he was ready to lavish
on the child a double portion of the protecting affection which, so
long as he was himself, he had shown to Horace.

Watching Harry in the new light of his mournful fatherhood, when he
was called on, by every generous and manly impulse, to be father
and mother in one, to the mite whose best friend or worst foe, whose
nearest natural guardian, he found himself, Oliver Constable arrived
at a correct conclusion. If any mere human creature could help to make
a man of Harry Stanhope, could raise him from his soulless levity and
the vicious craving which was grafted on it, it was—strange yet natural
to say, not a brave, devoted woman like Fan, who had gone down into
the breach and held a shield over her husband, and striven vainly to
be the stay to him which, had their relations to each other been what
they ought, he should have proved to her—but this merest atom of a
fellow-mortal, a thousand times weaker than Harry himself, who could
neither appeal to him nor remonstrate with him, who could simply hang
heavily upon him in her helplessness, and who was, humanly speaking,
altogether at his mercy for happiness or wretchedness.

Oliver was inclined to believe that Harry’s self-conviction had gone to
the root of the matter, and that even his most mercurial temperament
would never shake it off altogether.

Harry was well-nigh as sacred a trust bequeathed to Oliver by Fan as
her child could be. Indeed, while there were many humane people to
interpose and accept the gracious task of befriending the motherless
babe, who would volunteer to fill the thankless office of standing
by Harry and backing him in resisting the poison which was coursing
through his veins, and the familiar demon that beset him? But in the
meantime Oliver was not frightened to leave Harry Stanhope with his
brother, his infant, and the Weatherleys. When Oliver recalled the
last he confessed he had been unjust in asking incredulously who
would bestow themselves on Harry unless to serve themselves by his
undoing? So far from a knowledge of his former offences disposing the
Weatherleys to withdraw from the old offender, it would only attach
them to him more firmly. For a sinner who had turned or who gave the
faintest indication of turning from the error of his ways, had, if it
be possible, an almost morbid fascination for the clergyman and his
wife. They were not content with fulfilling the divine commission,
and preaching the grand truth that their Master would have mercy
and not sacrifice, their zeal ran away with their discretion until
they would have preferred the dying thief to the Apostle Paul. They
went the length of selecting for their friends and associates rueful
transgressors, in preference to men and women who had been kept and had
kept themselves, with infinite pains, from gross transgression. This
enthusiastic weakness which caused the Weatherleys to dote on reclaimed
burglars and pet converted infidels, almost to the cold exclusion
of people who had refrained from picking and stealing, and who had
reverently trusted and believed, was apt to be fertile in producing
wrath and restiveness in the intolerantly honest and loyal sections of
the community; and, what was still worse, in growing crops of hypocrisy
and fraud among the hardened and desperately deceitful outcasts from
society. But at least it rendered the couple safe to care for Harry
Stanhope and do their best to help him, and Oliver did not think that
Harry would abuse their kindness.

Oliver Constable did not hurry post haste, though he turned his face in
the direction of Friarton Mill, when he separated from his companions,
in the course of a few weeks after Fan’s death. He knew that many
changes as well as a great blank awaited him, and he sought to fit
himself to meet them in a spirit of peace, as well as to find healing
for his recent wound.

It was a soft, grey October afternoon when Oliver, leaving the railway
at an intermediate station as before, walked through the well-known
fields in their autumn livery, and arrived at Friarton Mill.

As it chanced—a chance for which she would never forgive herself—Sally
Pope, who had not been apprised of the exact date when he was likely to
return, had gone on her yearly holiday to visit her relations. Only a
strange young housemaid kept house and received Oliver, taking in good
faith his assertion that he was her master.

The dreary reception had, as a compensation, a certain relief for
the traveller; but he was not long left to his own thoughts. He had
hardly eaten the meal which his servant improvised in a state of
consternation, with regard to a future searching investigation and
sharp condemnation of all deficiencies by old Sally, when he became
aware, as he was in the act of strolling half mechanically across the
court, to his former smoking station in the mill gallery, that he
was threatened already with visitors from Copley Grange. A lady and
gentleman were walking across the park, and making straight for the
picturesque old mill.

Oliver groaned under this ill-timed manifestation of the popular
admiration shared between show places and show people, and prepared to
make himself scarce. He stopped short in his retreat, and faced the
intruders, the moment he recognised that they were Mr. and Mrs. Amyott.

The couple were the most put out by the encounter, for they had clearly
not expected to meet the miller in his own domain. It might be that
the squire was but partially informed of his young wife’s former
familiarity with Friarton Mill as well as with Copley Grange Farm, and
that he had proposed to take advantage of the fine afternoon by making
her better acquainted with what was, still more than the artistic
almshouses, a charming æsthetic advantage belonging to his place.

In that case Mrs. Amyott might have had some difficulty in evading the
proposal, or she might have been fain, on her side, to get over the
first visit to Friarton Mill in a new character, as early as possible,
in the absence of its master.

These explanations were more probable than what had flashed across
Oliver’s mind, and caused him to contort his figure by one of his
old excited, awkward movements, in a revulsion from a crying case of
heartless selfishness. He had thought for an instant, could the Amyotts
possibly have guessed the half-resolution which he was only turning
over in his own mind, to let or even sell the mill and mill-house, and
quit the neighbourhood, where there seemed nothing remaining for him to
do, where he had tried his utmost to work out his notions of duty and a
career, and had signally failed? Did the Amyotts know, from Friarton
gossip, that the Constables’ baking business in the town had diminished
to such a fraction that, in justice to himself and his coming
creditors, Oliver must give up the premises from which the business had
departed? Were his nearest neighbours seizing the first opportunity,
with indecent haste and mean covetousness, to sound him, in the hope
of, at the same time, obtaining Naboth’s vineyard and getting rid of
Mordecai at their gates?

Perhaps Mr. Amyott trusted to an immediate, tempting, and what he might
imagine a substantially handsome offer of purchase, at a fancy price,
to induce a man, impoverished and embarrassed by his crotchets, to
sell his birthright, and so to secure to the owners of Copley Grange
what one of them had long craved. If that were so, a man might well
pray to be delivered from the mania for high art, prevailing to the
extinction of common feeling. For was not the dainty bride, in her
refinement of bridal finery—sobered down still further by the necessity
of wearing a black gown, in memory of her brother’s late lowborn wife,
keenly desirous, under her pretence of mourning, to cut away the last
link between her and the Constables? And all the while she might have
guessed, if she had cared to use her woman’s wit, how much of old Peter
Constable’s honestly and laboriously earned money had gone to fill up
the gaps left by Mrs. Amyott’s brother’s reckless improvidence.

It was only for a moment that Oliver indulged the suspicion. He saw
almost immediately that the Amyotts were as much taken by surprise, and
more put out, than he was, though they recovered themselves with the
comparative celerity and ease of well-bred people, who were, by their
nurture and position, master and mistress of social situations, and
equal to any social difficulty.

For that matter, Agneta did such justice to her training and played
her part so well, that Oliver felt inclined to think she was lost as
a simple squire’s wife, and ought to have been a duchess, if not a
princess of some reigning royal family, or a queen in her own person.
She exhibited precisely the proper amount of feeling for the occasion,
without being overcome. She was touched, she was gently courteous and
even friendly to Oliver, without overstepping the limits which the
circumstance of her having become Mr. Amyott’s wife imposed upon Harry
Stanhope’s sister. She alluded simply and sadly to ‘the melancholy
event’ of Fan’s death. She enquired with interest when he had heard
from Harry, and expressed her earnest good wishes for the welfare of
‘the dear little baby.’ She broke off to thank him with grave sincerity
for all he had done for her brothers—though, with regard to the last
graciously grateful speech, Oliver could not avoid the impression that
Agneta considered him in some respects the obliged person, by having
had it in his power to serve the Stanhopes.

When the conversation strayed to more general topics, Mrs. Amyott
referred with a blending of judicious candour and tact—while her
slightly stooping, and slightly grey, but well-preserved husband
was paying her the lover-like compliment of listening with pleased
attention to every word she said—to the changes which had taken place
in the Mill court since she was there last. She displayed thus with
perfect serenity a considerable acquaintance with the landmarks.

‘Surely, Mr. Constable, there have been some boughs lopped from the
willow; and, ah! you have had the old seat, which I used to call “the
Pilgrim’s seat,” removed from under the mulberry-bush!’

Every word was in such unexceptionable taste; Oliver was let down
so gracefully and gradually from the terms which Agneta Stanhope had
insisted on establishing between them, during those vanished summer
days, that he was inclined to acquiesce in the squire’s conviction
that his last acquired gem was the most finely polished in his whole
collection of treasures.

In comparison, Mr. Amyott’s _rôle_ required little from the performer,
but he also acquitted himself admirably, with just the degree of
admission of Oliver’s claims which became a gentleman who would not
disallow an obligation, and yet who viewed, with reason, the whole
connection between Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill as a foolish
mistake. But he, too, did not refuse to recollect the past. He made
some cursory mention of his wife’s brothers having been his tenants
in the farm; nay, he said with a smile in reference to his recent
marriage, that the temporary arrangement had helped in bringing about
what was for him a most fortunate as well as permanent result. His
first introduction to his wife had arisen from it. Such trifling causes
are, in some sort, the motive power in shaping out our destinies.

Listening to her husband’s flattering acknowledgment of the
fortuitousness—for him—of her brothers’ short tenancy of Copley
Grange Farm, Agneta smiled sweetly back upon him. Mr. Amyott was
somewhat worn and still more languid in his middle age; a man to
whose over-cultivated nature much of the life around him, with which
his wife’s fresh youth had some instinctive sympathy, was rough,
rude, boisterous, and oppressive, even when it was not offensive, so
that the abiding expression of his aristocratic features was wistful
and pensive, rather than resolute and hopeful: still he was a fine
patrician-looking man, only a little past the prime of life, and a
trifle the worse for the wear. He was gentle and elegant—according
to the old standard of elegance, in his whole tone; a shade
plaintive and fretful occasionally, but never morose or violent.
He was deferential, almost to a fault, to the wishes of his wife,
which he was well able to gratify, since he happened to be in the
possession of an ample, unencumbered rent-roll, a charming place, so
well-ordered an establishment that her stepchildren never came in
their young stepmother’s way, but fell at once into the pleasantest
and most desirable relations with her, and a position second to few
in the county. From Agneta’s point of view, she had good cause to be
satisfied with the marriage which had fulfilled the expectations of
her guardians. Her education—whatever else it had stifled in her, had
served to develop largely a reasonable prudence.

The Amyotts managed to make use of the fact of Oliver’s arrival that
very afternoon, as an excuse for not waiting to receive the invitation
to enter the Mill-house, which its master was in no haste to give,
while both recognised that the omission on the first encounter served
as an index of the extent of their future intercourse.

Left alone, Oliver acknowledged the happy couple were free from
ulterior designs in invading his privacy. Apart from these, what was
Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? He had an idea that Harry and Horace
Stanhope, with their baby, would settle down at a distance from Copley
Grange, which would still farther simplify matters and smooth down
awkwardnesses, so that in the future intercourse of the Manor-house and
the Mill, Fan’s marriage, with its girlish aspirations, would soon be
as though it had never been—and it was best so.

Oliver reached the carved gallery at last; and leant over the
balustrade looking down on the water of the Brook and away over the
woody undulating ground of Copley Grange Park, where the sombre green
thorns were covered with dark crimson haws, and no note of a bird broke
the stillness, which was only made alive by the monotonous babbling of
the Brook. How vividly some of the more significant scenes of his life,
since he attained manhood, rose before him there! The thorns were red
and white again in flower, and the thrush was once more singing, as he
broke to Fan his life-purpose, and combated her objections. How full
of confidence he had been! With what high hopes and steadfast resolves
he had entered on his mission, and it had come to nothing! He had been
foiled on every side, till at last he was allowing himself to drift out
of the struggle.

He was watching the ducks eating the mulberries, and turning his back,
in vain, on a stalwart young figure cumbered with a limber attendant,
belonging, by rights, to Oliver’s gone-by ’Varsity days, and yet
starting up, stepping out there through the park, and hailing him on
his threshold, in spite of him.

He was walking with Fan in her garden, listening to her unwonted
chatter and warm admiration of these new friends.

The master baker was jostled, tripped up, and thrown down afresh by his
late journeyman in the twilight lane yonder.

Oliver was cut dead anew by Catherine Hilliard in the High Street of
Friarton.

The frost was on the ground while Harry Stanhope was besieging Oliver’s
bedroom door to announce his intentions; and presently the brother was
facing the sister on the hearthrug, holding her back from her fate.

Oliver was grasping Fan’s hands and pledging himself the devil should
not have Harry. Oliver was binding himself to give up any grain which
he might have gathered from the crop which had cost him so dear, that
he might help her to lie on the bed which she had made for herself.
Yet Harry’s deliverance had proved harder to effect than that of Tam
Lane in the ballad. It had been beyond the power either of strong man
or devoted woman, though it was just possible, after Fan’s dead hands
dropped the task, it might be performed by baby fingers in God’s great
way of nature.

Would Oliver, with his present knowledge, do all he had done over
again, if the choice were once more given him? He thought it over
deliberately and as calmly as he could, in trying to form his plans
for the future, and he honestly believed he would. He solemnly
thanked God for the boon of such a belief, to soften the soreness of
his disappointment and defeat, and still the ache of his heart. The
consciousness confirmed his faith that there had been some good in
his aims. They had not owed their origin entirely to presumption and
self-conceit. However rash and over-confident he might have been,
however much he had bungled the whole business, he had the assurance
of his conscience that the fault had not lain largely in his motives.
Yes, he would if he could begin it all over again—to establish higher
principles of trade—to make trade honourable, to fill hungry mouths
with wholesome food; and he would still have granted Fan’s petition
at all hazards. How did he know that he was to prove the pioneer of
trade reformation, while he was well assured that he was his sister’s
natural refuge and stay? He could not have made himself strange to his
own flesh, with whom his first duty lay. He must have acknowledged the
obligation for charity to begin at home.

Before the dusk prevented him, Oliver took out and re-read Harry
Stanhope’s last letter. It was a little longer than the usual brief
reports, which were hardly higher intellectual efforts than those of
the young rustics whose vicar has seen that they have profited by a
night-school. This was the ordinary style of Harry’s letters:—

  ‘Dear Constable,—Here goes. We are all well. Baby is thriving. She
  has got her frocks shortened, and looks the better for it. It is
  still awfully hot. We—Harry and me, for Mr. and Mrs. Weatherley don’t
  try the dodge—took a header, and had a swim in the river for an hour
  this morning. Woodhurst—that’s the man whose ground lies all about
  here, is to let us have lots of fishing. I hope you’re all right.
                                                       ‘Yours, &c.’

That was as nearly as possible the substance of the unclerkly scrawls
which Harry sent. But to write at all, without compelling cause, was a
great advance on the writer’s native inconsiderateness and freedom from
any comprehension of responsibility.

In the letter which Oliver held in his hand, however, Harry, in his
stumbling jerking manner, had contrived to say a good deal more.

The two Stanhopes had gone back with the Weatherleys, on the return
of the clergyman and his wife to their country parish, and had found
lodgings close to the vicarage where Mrs. Weatherley still had the baby
in her kind care. It was the attraction of the baby—with the fear of
doing it harm by removing it from the good offices of an experienced
matron—which in the beginning drew Harry and his brother across the
Channel, back to England, and down into the rural retirement of a
remote parish. But it soon became plain that the Weatherleys—coming in
contact with Harry Stanhope at a turning point in his life, getting him
into their hands when his heart was wrung with suffering and his whole
character subdued—had acquired a growing influence over the young man.
He was rapidly adopting their forms of thought and turns of speech,
and falling in, to some extent, with their habits and practices. He
had always possessed in a sense a ductile disposition, apt to take
the moulding of its surroundings and associations. But a great wrench
had been required to separate a thoughtless young fellow from his low
atmosphere—laden with earthly vapours and dense with worldliness,
and to launch him into the higher, rarer air of altogether loftier
principles and considerations, breathed by the Weatherleys. Harry had
suffered such a wrench and received such an impetus as propels many
men—especially many shallow, impulsive men—to the opposite poles of
their former opinions and pursuits.

At this epoch of his history—when Harry Stanhope turned inevitably,
with a sick heart, from his old interests; when all his former sports,
though he still engaged in them mechanically, were flat and stale to
him; when what was spiritual in his moral constitution craved spiritual
consolation and refreshment—something beyond this world, some promise
of reward and restoration for his lost love and its object, some
reparation of all wrong, and enduring foundation for all good—Harry
was carried out of the past in a totally new direction from any he had
followed hitherto, where his brother would join him sooner or later.

Harry retained his simple cordiality, but the simplicity had got a
new bias, and the cordiality a fresh outlet. In those letters—the
occasional writing of which, without the inducement of borrowing money,
was a marvel in itself—while he expressed himself scantily, there was
also something of the transparent prattle though not the gush of a girl.

In the more recent prattle Oliver learnt a good deal of church services
and parish work, in which, to his wonder at first, he found Harry
was taking part. He had been practising with Mr. Weatherley’s choir,
and doing a little rudimentary teaching in his schools, as well as
helping Mrs. Weatherley with her parish children’s annual feast and the
machinery of her different clubs.

Harry did not dream of making the slightest apology for those
extraordinary occupations. He was as free from self-consciousness now
as ever. He mentioned the schools and the festival as naturally and
unaffectedly as if he had been referring to a cricket-match and the
dinner which followed. That struck Oliver as the most hopeful symptom
in the case, and he was as devoutly glad as the Weatherleys could have
wished.

But Oliver’s gladness received a sudden check when he found Harry
writing humbly enough, to be sure, of his unfitness for reading for
orders, as Mr. Weatherley had just been suggesting he might do.

‘Good heavens, I should think not!’ assented Oliver in a great heat.
‘I am glad Harry retains one iota of common sense, if Weatherley is
so far out of his mind. Now, even supposing Harry has outlived his
lamentable propensity—supposing he were to pass muster, I should have
to interfere and speak to the bishop.’

But poor Harry was not really thinking of anything so far beyond him.
He was only modestly preluding the statement that he had been with Mr.
Weatherley when he was delivering some of his cottage addresses, and
Harry had been moved and helped to say a word of warning from his own
experience.

Was Harry in the way of being taught to go about and speak at such
meetings? Had he, too, turned social reformer and preacher—in the last
particular, as Oliver was free to admit, shrugging his shoulders, far
outstripping his, Oliver’s, performances? Would Harry’s inveterate
fancy for joining in whatever was going on, his incorrigible
good-fellowship, thenceforth, or even for a time, take the shape of
lay aid in priestly ministrations, pointing Mr. Weatherley’s morals
by a word in season from a sinner who was a standing commentary on
the vicar’s text—at once a warning and an example, a young man who
was ready to proclaim himself an evildoer formerly, one who had known
both the temptation and the penalty, but had escaped with the skin of
his teeth? Would Harry, if he continued in well-doing, go on exposing
his shortcomings, steeling himself in the exposure, till he should
come to Fan’s wrongs? Would he regard it as an act of expiation, and
an offering for the good of his fellow-men, to speak out thus, and
when his little daughter was old enough to listen to his words and
understand them, would he still tell his piteous tale, and humble
himself in her hearing—it might be in the hearing of some other
evangelist’s daughter or sister, who might have replaced Fan and become
Harry’s second wife, and the mother of his children?

Oliver writhed at the mere notion. He recalled Fan’s strong, proud
reserve in the middle of her ardour, her delicate reticence, her
unconquerable shrinking from common speculation and coarse comment.
Were the sacred secrets of her death-bed to be bruited about and made
food for vulgar curiosity by this new kind of weak excess in the man
who had inflicted the agony?

Then Oliver called himself back. Had he any right to sit in stern
judgment on Harry Stanhope’s weakness, granted that it was weakness
even to self-indulgence? What if this were the sole refuge for Harry
Stanhope, the only means by which the man whom Fan had so loved and
striven to win, could be won to virtue and temperance? What if this
were the single method by which Harry could serve his fellow-creatures?
There are dull or besotted scholars who can receive no teaching save
from homely, broad personalities, and there are primitive teachers
who if they are not personal are nothing. Such teaching might appear
little better than foolish and despicable to Oliver Constable, and yet
what assurance had he, in his arrogance and self-sufficiency, that it
was not among the foolish things which God has chosen to confound the
wise? Might not Fan, from her peace among the angels, regard these
ebullitions—which were at least frank and guileless—that vexed Oliver’s
soul, in an altogether different light from that in which she would
have seen them, had she been still living an erring woman on earth?

No; let poor Harry do what seemed good unto him. God forbid that Oliver
should put hindrances in Harry’s path—the path which was, perhaps, best
suited for his stumbling feet.




                             CHAPTER XXIX.

                             FRESH SERVICE.


On the night of his return, Oliver had been tempted to say—

  My wound is deep,
  I fain would sleep,
  Take thou the vanguard of the three;

but the next day found him again leading the van. Happy the wounded who
have still strength for the fight, and whose presence is yet wanted in
the thick of the fray.

Sally Pope arrived at an early hour the following morning, and gave her
master her greeting. She was so full of self-reproach for her unlucky
absence the previous evening that it diverted her in some degree from
the loud condolences which he was only too content to be spared. And
Sally was a shrewd woman; she knew that ‘men-folk do not care to return
to the topic of their grief, as poor critters of women will discuss it
at large, and find comfort in dwelling on their trials;’ so when her
single heartfelt lamentation for ‘poor Miss Fan as were that nimble and
clever,’ had been made, Sally set herself to divert Oliver from the
cold comfort of his lonely home-coming, by retailing to him all the
latest news of Friarton.

‘Lord, Master Oliver, we’re not singular in our troubles! There’s young
Dadd down with fever, lying between life and death. Not a critter will
enter Dadd’s shop—not to say the house, and the old people are nigh
besides themselves.’

‘Poor Jack! poor souls!’ said Oliver. ‘But what has become of the
Sister—the wonderful nurse Mrs. Hilliard imported into the town?’

‘Oh! she’s gone these three months, the more reason that Miss Hilliard
is as spry as any of the rest of the young ladies. But now, Master
Oliver,’ broke off Sally, putting her head on one side and speaking
deprecatingly, almost mincingly, ‘I know as great allowance ought
to be made for idle ladies, and that they mun be left for to direct
themselves in many ways not open to the commonality, else they’ll
fall to pieces like a dry wash-tub, or go all over red rust like a
flat-iron laid aside, and be in danger of slipping through their
friends’ fingers like Miss Hilliard all but slipped, and gave no end
of trouble, the silly thing! Still, Master Oliver, do you think it is
proper for ladies, as are none so old or ill-favoured, to go and get
rid of their spare time—and all time is to spare with them—a feeling of
the pulses and looking at the tongues of sick carters and masons and
their families, ay, and of tramps and their brats, a-treating of them
to shooken’up pillows and cooling drinks, and as many blisters and
draughts as they can set their minds to—save us?’

‘Well, Sally, at least you’ll allow it is a good chance for the masons
and tramps,’ said Oliver with a laugh.

‘I dunno,’ Sally shook her head. ‘I think the world’s turned upside
down. But leastways better such folly than that Miss ’Mily Polley’s
been up to.’

‘What has Miss ’Mily been up to?’

‘Gone and lost her good name, which she’ll never pick up again—not
though she were the queen on the throne, with armies and navies to
scour the world in search of it, at her word. Now there’s nothing left
Miss ’Mily save a patched-up marriage, to cover the disgrace as will
not be covered, to a rolling stone of a ne’er-do-well that will bring
her to want and misery. Her as was such a pert piece, setting herself
up, picking holes in the coats of her betters, and giggling in her
light-headedness at this body and that body, as if she herself were a
non-such and could go her own road and fear no fall.’ Sally ended with
the cruel relish with which the old, who ought to be, and who, let us
be thankful, often are, the most charitable, still sometimes, alas!
under provocation, contemplate their young neighbours’ receiving their
deserts.

‘You must be mistaken, Sally,’ remonstrated Oliver, grieved and
shocked. ‘It cannot be as you say. The Polleys have always been most
respectable people. Even Polley, though a useless sinner, picked
himself up, you know. You must have taken some coarse scandal for
gospel. Mrs. Polley has been a good mother, and has looked well after
her daughters.’

‘Excuse me, Master Oliver, but it’s much you know of it, sir,’ said
Sally, half huffily, half scornfully. ‘And it is little thanks Mrs.
Polley, poor woman, have got for her work in the shop and her rule of
her family. She were a bit set up, in her own way, and vaunty of what
she had done for them gals and that silly man of hers. Nobody came near
herself, and nought that belonged to her was to be sneezed at. Ah!
her mouth’s shut now, and she won’t hold up her head again, not by a
long chalk, as she has done in Friarton. I am sorry for her though,’
reflected Sally, showing some signs of relenting, ‘for she were a
through-going woman. Her took the whole load upon her own shoulders,
when it fell off them sloping ones of Polley’s, and asked help from
nobody. Hard she drudged a dozen years back, never sparing herself, to
keep her family out of the gutter. It was ill-done of any one of them
to humble her pride. But it’s the way of children—so it is. It’s a
comfort to the likes of me, as is a single woman, alone in the world,
except for a niece and neffy or two—looking after my savings I’ll be
bound, Master Oliver—to think that I might have had a man and bairns to
my share, and been no better—rather worse served. But I’ll fault Mrs.
Polley with this’—Sally returned to the charge—‘she would do everything
in the shop with her ten fingers. She would keep the management of the
books and accounts in her own hands. Why, them gals weren’t properly
brought up to the grocery business or to any other. They were as silly
as silly could be, if you took them off weighing a pound of sugar, or
cutting a bar of soap, as a child could do. Our Miss Fan could have
bought them at the one end of the town and sold them at t’other. They
went a deal of their time hand-idle, or falalling with their best
clothes; and was that an up-bringing to keep them out of mischief? I
have it on good authority, they would lay a-bed in the mornings, and
they were out at their gadding every blessed evening, though she
pulled them up tight about minding meals and hours, and shutting up
to her face. If they were quick, they could get their heads out—most
of all Miss ’Mily, as was the mother’s favourite—so it seems she had
been drawing a score under her mother’s nose, and carrying on at a fine
rate with that scamp of a half gentleman—a pretty gentleman! Mrs. Sam
Cobbes’ Lon’on brother, though Mrs. Polley had forbidden her gal to
have anything to say to him.’

‘I should think so,’ said Oliver, with decision. He knew the man—a
fellow with a specious address, and the glamour of expectations from a
rich uncle in the Customs, which served him as an apology for losing
such mongrel situations as he occasionally condescended to fill, and
for loafing away the greater portion of his days, hanging on to other
and humbler relations than the autocrat in the Customs, the credulous
Cobbes for instance, always in a lazy, often in a disreputable
fashion. He was just the sort of acquaintance, full of false
pretensions, vulgar smartness, and strongly-flavoured dash, to take the
fancy of an ignorant, ill-brought-up, wilful girl like ’Mily Polley.
And on the man’s side, he would not hesitate to amuse himself with her
openly-expressed admiration, as the best joke going.

But Sally was eager to empty her budget. ‘Mrs. Polley she finds
out that ’Mily is snapping her fingers in her mother’s face,’ the
storyteller resumed the thread of her narrative, nothing loth, ‘and
keeping company with Birt on the sly, continually: so the old woman’s
temper, as is none of the coolest at the best of times, flies into a
blaze, and she up and dares the gal to see the fellow again, or she
will be turned to the door, as not worthy of such a home, and to serve
as a warning to her sisters. Mrs. Polley, if you please, never lets
’Mily out of her sight from that moment, except at night, when the
mother locks the gals’ room door on them, in their hearing.

‘Sure enough, it is no more use than locking the stable-door after the
horse has got his head out of the halter, and kicked up his heels in
giving the stable-boy the go-by. And the black affront before the rest
of the family—certain to leak out too, with the feeling of a gaol,
after the liberty the gal had snatched, in spite of Mrs. Policy’s
tantrums, druv Miss ’Mily from bad to worse. She goes and throws dust
into the eyes of them sillies of sisters, or else she scares them
into telling no tales; she bribes the poor slavey of a maid. Any how,
Master Oliver, she manages to give her mother the slip again, gets out
of the house after it is shut up for the night, and runs and meets
the scoundrel at the improperest hours. All is up with the foolish,
wrong-headed lass’s good name then, Master Oliver, I need not go for to
tell you. Mrs. Polley catches her youngest daughter a stealing in at
the airy-door, under cloud of night, and thrusts her out with her own
hand, raging that ’Mily is never to cross her mother’s honest threshold
again. She will have nought more to say to the gal; she may go back to
where she came from.

‘Them as told me,’ said Sally, after a pause to recover her breath in
her unconscious dramatising of the miserable details, ‘maintained that
Polley did interfere, and try to put in a word for his daughter; but,
in course, his wife would not hear him, and it do stand to reason that
he has been so poor a critter, he has lost all title to be listened
to. The long and the short of it is, the talk was over the whole town
the next morning. The Cobbes took ’Mily in—they could not do less—with
Birt, who had got the gal into trouble, their brother; and ’Mily Polley
is to be married, and go straight off to Lon’on, or Manchester, or
Glasgow—one of them big towns—with her bargain next week. Folk think
Sam Cobbe’s that ashamed, he has forked out the money—though he’s none
so rich, and the coal and potato trade ain’t so flourishing—and has
used all his influence to over-persuade Birt, by threatening to expose
him to his uncle in the Customs, to make the gal the amends of marrying
her against his will—the mean scuff.’

‘I am afraid it is a bad business,’ admitted Oliver sadly, compelled
as he was to regard this lingering version, in a lower walk of life,
of the wild, youthful escapades, and the half-brutal parental tyranny
and violence which met the rebellion half way, that were to be found in
every rank, before Christian civilisation did its work, a century and
more ago. Now such evil tales were only possible among the desperately
vicious of the highest, and the desperately ignorant of the lowest,
ranks, or in the gross materialism and incapability of self-restraint
which form the standing reproach and grievous disfigurement, to set
against the many virtues of that large class of smaller shopkeepers—to
raise whom in the scale of humanity Oliver Constable had been willing
to devote his life.

Oliver went immediately to Friarton to look after his own business. It
did not take him long to despatch what he had to do. He had only to
receive the last report from the not greatly interested foreman. It
was quite what Oliver had expected. He went through it in less than an
hour. It took him no more than ten minutes afterwards to write out, in
the back shop, his announcement of giving up his father’s and his own
baking business—he could not pretend to sell the goodwill of what had
ceased to pay its cost—to be inserted in the next week’s Friarton’s
newspapers.

Oliver walked along the High Street afterwards, without happening to
meet any save the most casual acquaintances. He passed the Polleys’
shop door, having a glimpse of Mrs. Polley with the purplish flush on
her face to which she was liable, fixed in her cheeks, and a certain
hard, set turn of the head and jerking activity of movement, as she
served her customers. He knew that she would stand and do her work
there, though the force she put on herself might involve the danger
of her falling behind the counter. But he could not go in then,
or for some time to come—not till the sough of the scandal in the
family had so far died out, and the bitter mortification its head was
experiencing, had partly worn off. Sympathy and condolence were not to
be thought of here. They would be a positive insult.

But there was nothing to hinder Oliver from repairing to the Dadds’,
forgetful of the coolness between him and Jack, or rather spurred on by
it to the quicker exercise of old friendship.

Oliver found the shop much as it had been described by Sally Pope,
forsaken by customers, abandoned to the disheartened journeymen and
shop-boys, with the goods either unexposed for sale or lying about
in a state of confusion and disorder, which marked the absence or
indifference of the masters. For both the Dadds had taken pride in
their well-filled, well-kept shop. Friarton was somewhat given to
panics in case of dangerous infectious diseases. The undaunted Sister
who had brought light above the horizon had not stayed long enough to
convert the town to her view of illness.

Oliver had barely time to enquire for the patient, when old Dadd
hurried out from the back shop and accosted him. It was a relief to
distinguish the voice of an old friend who had come voluntarily into
the shop and was standing quietly leaning against the counter, instead
of fleeing from the place, as if it were a pest-house. It almost
exhilarated the stout-hearted old man, who was keeping up bravely, to
crack one of his old jokes.

‘Not come back yet a family man, Mr. Oliver? Not wholly without its
advantage—I mean the bachelor state. Mind coming in farther? Bless you!
_don’t_ you mind? It will do Mrs. Dadd a power of good to see a strange
face—as ain’t really strange—quite the contrary, and ain’t the doctor’s
or one of them dratted nurses—which they never keep their time nor do
their dooty properly, as the poor fellow needing them knows to his cost.
His mother can’t watch day and night for weeks, and I’m but a poor
hand at the trade,’ said the father wistfully, ‘though I would give a
deal to take it up off-hand. But, you see, it don’t come natural like
to a man as it do to a woman, and I wasn’t bred to it, in any sort,
being come of a healthy family,’ rambled the linen-draper, staving off
questions, as Oliver suspected, till they were through the back shop,
up the stair and into the vacant, dreary-looking best parlour, with
its torn prescriptions cast heedlessly on the carpet and its tray of
half-empty physic-bottles and slops put down recklessly on the edge
of the table, where guests had been wont to see more substantial fare
carefully deposited. Then old Dadd raised his fist and was about to
bring it down on the table with a bang—which in the very act of being
dealt, was caught up and so much suppressed that it barely caused
the physic-bottles to jingle, because Jack’s bedroom lay no farther
off than the other side of the passage. ‘Yes, sir, my boy Jack is
swimming for his life, they tell me,’ said the poor man, winking his
eyes, knitting his brows hard, and speaking as if Oliver were about to
question the statement.

The door behind them opened, and the unnaturally pitched voice sank
into silence abruptly, while the late speaker turned eagerly to meet
the new comer.

Mrs. Dadd had thought Oliver was the doctor, and entered hastily. At
the sudden sight of her son’s contemporary and old companion standing
there in the flush of health and strength, she broke down, for a
moment, more completely than Dadd had done, to his great dismay. For
Mrs. Dadd was a mannerly woman—so far as she understood manners. She
prided herself on being at home with sickness, and she was accustomed
to say, she did not know what a woman was good for, unless it were to
bear up on these occasions when a man was sure to give way. One gain
that was got by her sinking into a chair and covering her face, in
place of greeting Oliver, was that it roused old Dadd to bustle about
in order to quiet her, and to seek to explain the strange state of
matters to Oliver.

‘Now, don’t take on so, like a good soul; he ain’t worse since morning.
No, I knew it. And don’t you go for to think, Mr. Oliver, it’s any ill
feeling to you that’s sticking in the Missuss’s throat. Nothing of the
kind, sir. Why, that was all out of head with poor Jack himself—who was
never a chap to bear malice, months ago. He said to me only the other
day when this illness was coming on him; “I can’t tell what ails me,
father; it ain’t my head, or my back, or my legs in petickler—only I
feel seedy all over. I ain’t fit for the shop, and I’m still less fit
for a field-day”—you see the autumn manoeuvres was coming on—“if it had
been a year or two back, I might have gone out to Friarton Mill and had
a quiet afternoon with Constable, and tried what that would have done
for me. Yes,” he said, “I remember there was bad blood between us; but
I’m not so cock sure as I have been, that I had the best of it. Anyhow,
Constable was the right sort to go to, at a pinch. You could look to be
borne with, and set on your feet again when you felt you had not a leg
left to stand on, as it is my bad luck to do to-day.”’

‘That was very good of Jack,’ said Oliver warmly. ‘Then you’ll let me
sit up with him tonight, since he’ll not mind; perhaps he’ll rather
like it. I don’t mean to boast of my qualifications as a nurse; but I
think you and Mrs. Dadd may trust me to see to the doctor’s orders.’

‘I should think so, Mr. Oliver,’ said Dadd with emphasis. ‘You are
kind, and we are much indebted to you, as we’ll tell you better some
day, please God. Others has offered, but none so hearty, or whom we
could put such faith in,’ old Dadd astonished Oliver by saying. ‘And as
to Jack’s minding or liking, bless you! he don’t know his own mother
from a stranger, and hasn’t these three days back.’

‘It’s that as has made me useless, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Dadd, sitting
up and apologising feebly; ‘so that I haven’t even had the grace to
thank you for your offer.’

‘Never mind thanks,’ said Oliver. ‘Did my father go out of his way to
thank you when you stayed at Friarton Mill and brought his little girl
through her fever?’

‘Ah, that was different; that was all in a woman’s way for a motherless
little thing, and I ran no risk, having had the scarlet fever myself
when I was a child. I wish I had been with her at the last, poor soul!
When her trouble came upon her, in a strange place, and none as she
knew, save men to look after her, I reckon she would have cared then to
see the face of an old acquaintance, as was a woman like herself and
knew her needs. But the Lord will protect you, Mr. Oliver, as He may
have raised you up, and sent you home, at this time, to save my dear
Jack. May be it is the greatest mark of respect I could show you or any
man, after all, to think of leaving my own lad in your care.’

Oliver did not know about having been raised up and sent home to
save Jack Dadd, but he said ‘Surely,’ with fervour to Mrs. Dadd’s
passionate amendment on her formal thanks.

So Oliver was regularly installed, with the doctor’s consent,
night-nurse to Jack Dadd; and in place of calling at the Meadows, he
went out of the way to avoid the house and any chance of encountering
Mrs. Hilliard or her cousin, as he passed backwards and forwards
between the rooms above the shop in the High Street, Friarton, and
Friarton Mill for a considerable number of mornings and evenings. Such
fellow-townsmen as he met contented themselves with looking curiously
after him, whether they stopped him to enquire for the sick man,
or whether they crossed the street to shun the lightest breath of
infection. An odd fish, Oliver Constable, not without feeling—strange
to say—in his queer composition.




                              CHAPTER XXX.

             STUMBLED ACROSS—INTERVIEWED—TAKEN AT HIS WORD.


One night, before it was late, as Oliver was stooping over Jack, trying
to ascertain whether he were really muttering irrelevantly,

  ‘There’s Ruby, and Rover, and Ranter, too,’

or asking for something the sufferer wanted, a man’s figure in
professional black, which was yet not the doctor’s, appeared on the
opposite side of the bed. Oliver looked up—it was Mr. Holland, the
Dadds’ and Oliver’s minister. He had not been there before—partly
because he had been away on sick leave, partly because he had returned,
only half recruited, after the anxiously economised weeks at the
sea-side with his family—difficult for the poor minister to afford in
more ways than one. And his wife had so implored him not to put his
shaken health and strength, not fairly reestablished, to the severe
test of a fever-laden atmosphere, that he had yielded reluctantly,
and kept away from the unconscious Jack and his burdened father and
mother, till Mr. Holland could do so no longer. Come what might of it,
though it should cost him his own life, and his wife should be left
a widow and his children fatherless, the pastor must be at his post;
and when he went to it, he found the rebel of his congregation hanging
over the sick man—indifferent to inhaling the tainted vapours at the
fountain-head.

Mr. Holland coloured high and hesitated.

Oliver looked up and spoke without the slightest difficulty, rather
with a roughish freedom, born of the necessity of the moment.

‘Hallo, sir! are you there? Look here, Holland; from the colour of your
coat, you have seen more sickness than I. Can you feel a pulse? Can you
pronounce on the state of a tongue? You come as a stranger, you can
tell how Jack strikes you. What do you think of his chance?’

Mr. Holland stepped forward and did as he was required. Oliver and he
consulted together and watched and nursed Jack, without a thought of
anybody besides, for some hours. Then, after the clergyman had taken up
his hat to go, he hesitated once more, put it down again, and touched
Oliver’s arm with a hand that shook slightly.

‘Brother,’ said Mr. Holland solemnly, in phraseology adopted both by
Papists and Puritans in exceptional circumstances and seasons of strong
feeling, ‘have you any objection to joining with me in prayer, and
offering up an intercession for our sick brother?’

‘None in the world,’ replied Oliver promptly. And the two men prayed
aloud by the voice of the one, for Jack Dadd.

The next Sunday, Mr. Holland preached a sermon, which slightly
bewildered his hearers, on the text, ‘Not they who say “Lord, Lord,”
but they who do the will of my Father.’

The early October mornings were getting always darker—with a darkness
which partook of white haze as well as dank wet, dimmer, chiller, when
Oliver—buttoning up his great coat, as he came out of the Dadds’ house
into the street, where last night’s lamps were still burning, and which
had not yet woke up for the day, since not even an early milkman had
put in an appearance—was startled by a woman in a bonnet and veil,
hugging a shawl round her, coming out upon him from the nearest alley,
and accosting him in a gasping, constrained voice.

‘Please, sir, can you tell me how Mr.—how Mr. Jack Dadd is going on
this morning?’ enquired the speaker, with little pants between the
broken utterances of the words.

In place of answering the question, Oliver exclaimed in amazement,
‘Miss ’Liza Polley! What are you doing here at this hour of the
morning?’

‘Oh, Mr. Oliver, don’t betray me!’ cried poor ’Liza, in her natural
voice, though it was quivering with distress and terror. ‘I thought you
would not know me. But never mind that just now; tell me quick, how is
Jack? Oh! will he die, Mr. Oliver? Will Jack die?’

‘I hope not,’ said Oliver gently; ‘he’s no worse, and every hour gained
is in his favour. But this is not a time for you to be out. It was not
six when Mrs. Dadd took my seat. Let me see you home, Miss ’Liza, at
once.’

‘Oh! no, no, Mr. Oliver,’ refused ’Liza, in a fresh paroxysm of alarm
and trouble. Mother would be fit to kill me outright, if I came in
with a man—with a gentleman, at this hour of the morning—though it is
morning—not night,’ pleaded ’Liza piteously; ‘and old Betty Miles has
come to wash, and had the door opened for her’—taking further refuge
in the business of the day’s having really begun—‘or else I should not
have dared to get up, and slip out at all. Oh dear! You do not know
how hard mother has grown, how hard everything is, since poor ’Mily
went wrong,’ protested ’Liza, weeping, not violently, but in a crushed
manner. ‘It is so dull you cannot think! We dare not lift up our heads
from our work, or make a joke, or speak of running out to pay a single
call. Mother says we are all as bad as ’Mily, and have no sense or
feeling. She is ashamed of us. No respectable people will wish us to
darken their doors, or dream of returning our visits. But oh! it would
be nothing, Mr. Oliver,’ broke off ’Liza, returning to the dominant
cause of her misery, ‘if Jack Dadd were only a little better. Mother
may do or say what she chooses,’ continued the girl, writhing like any
other worm trodden on, and turning on its oppressor, ‘I must and will
hear how Jack is, or I shall go mad. Mother may serve me as she served
’Mily. I don’t care, there! Anybody may hear me, and go and tell mother
that likes.’

‘Jack is highly honoured,’ said Oliver, at a loss for any other
observation. ‘But now, don’t you think, since he is no worse, and will
soon, I trust, be a great deal better, it would be as well for you to
take care of yourself, and do what your mother wishes you, for his
sake, as well as hers, Miss ’Liza?’

‘Oh! hush, hush! Don’t say my name, in case anybody hear you,’ ’Liza
objected with the greatest inconsistency. ‘You are a kind chap—that is,
you are very good; but I did not mean you or anybody to see or know me.
I thought you would not penetrate my disguise,’ said ’Liza with solemn
simplicity.

‘I was too clever,’ said Oliver, tempted to laugh.

‘But you will not think ill of me?’ besought ’Liza—sinking again, in
a moment, from the part of the heroine of romance she had formerly
longed to play, which, even this morning, she had found some faint
compensation in trying to support, for Jack was not dead, only very
ill—into the affronted, unhappy, childish young woman. ‘You will not
tell upon me? You see Jack Dadd and I have known each other all our
days, and sometimes—well, he has looked and said things—though he was
not always kind. He was fair angry because I let you talk to me first
when you came back,’ explained ’Liza, with a little hysterical giggle.
‘I am sure, Mr. Oliver, we two said nothing which all the world might
not have heard, and Jack had given himself no right to interfere with
me for speaking to anybody. Now mother says nobody will ever care
to come near us again, after the disgrace ’Mily has brought upon the
family.’ ’Liza began to droop afresh, and to cry without the most
distant admixture of small triumphant laughter. ‘It would be very hard
and cruel, if it were true, for how could we—Ann and I, help it? Mother
was always putting ’Mily before us,’ complained ’Liza resentfully,
‘and Jack and ’Mily would carry on together, just to plague me, I
believe. Oh dear! what am I doing?’—stopping short and wringing her
hands—‘Blaming Jack when he may be dying or dead for aught I know; and
I may never see or speak to him again in my life. But I should not mind
that, if God would only let Jack live and get well and be happy, though
it were all away from me. Oh! Mr. Oliver, will he live? Will Jack live?’

The poor delicate girl was quite spent and shaken. She was forced to
let Oliver—who was not without some apprehension of arousing the blind
fury of Mrs. Polley—give her his arm within sight of her mother’s door.

‘So that was the way of it?’ Oliver said to himself softly, as he
walked away. ‘Poor thing! poor old Jack—who can hardly move a finger at
this moment! And I came between them and made mischief, did I? without
the faintest suspicion, in my stupid bungling? But, let us be thankful,
it may not be too Late to set this right if the beggar will only
recover.’

Oliver was coming in to Jack, not going from him, when the gas-lights
in the streets of Friarton looked white and bright and encouraging
as they look with the night setting in—not yellow and faded and
dispiriting, after a career of unwarrantable dissipation, according to
their faithless discomfiting habit with the first streak of dawn.

There were still many people about, largely the promenaders, shoppers,
and callers belonging to the classes to which day brings work and
evening recreation, with the recreation consisting mainly of what is
best expressed by the old-fashioned word ‘gadding’—going abroad and
foraging for some little excitement in the way of gossip or otherwise.
This was the season when the Polley girls had been wont to disport
themselves among their acquaintances, till the striking of a clock sent
them scampering and scuttling home, like Cinderella minus her glass
slipper.

And sure enough ’Mily Polley came forward in her conspicuous hat and
outrageous skirt, bustling along as if all the business of Friarton
were left for her to do, and meeting Oliver Constable in the face.

At the first glance she appeared perfectly unabashed. The only
difference in her was that to the girlish pertness and boldness there
was added a touch of the hard brazenness which defies such a position
as hers. She was alone—she espied Oliver at once. Her sharp eyes had
never been known to miss man or woman, and now—far from being cast
down, they were roving on all sides, challenging every passer-by.
There was the complete contrast between ’Liza and ’Mily Polley which
is generally to be found between the sinned against and the sinner.
’Mily attempted no foolish disguise. She was not seeking to escape from
Oliver’s recognition. She darted up to him, hailing him loudly—‘Mr.
Oliver Constable, it is a treat to see you now-a-days.’

Oliver stopped and spoke to ’Mily. She made no enquiry for Jack Dadd,
or the most distant allusion to Oliver’s recent loss. On the contrary,
in full view of his mourning, she referred to the changes which had
occurred lately, with boisterous gaiety. ‘And there are more and
greater changes coming, I can tell you, Mr. Oliver,’ said ’Mily, in her
glibest manner. ‘I am turning my back on this dull hole, I’m glad to
say. I am to be married next Thursday; the day is so near that I need
not make a mystery of it. I dare say you have heard, though you have
not wished me joy yet. If you were quicker about it, I might give you
an invitation to my wedding.’

‘Do,’ said Oliver, on the impulse of the moment; ‘and I’ll be happy to
come in the character of an old friend.’

‘Will you?’ asked ’Mily, quickly and doubtfully. ‘Will you, indeed, Mr.
Oliver? Do you mean what you say?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘That will be awfully good of you. I’ll be as proud as a peacock;
no’—with a sudden flush—‘not that, but very much obliged and thankful
to show his friends that all the people I ever knew have not turned
their backs upon me.’ She finished with bitterness, still her voice
and face betrayed some shame and regret. ‘Would you mind walking and
talking with me a bit, Mr. Oliver?’ she asked almost gently. ‘We’ll
turn down into Jervis’s yard, where there is nobody working at this
hour. I should like to speak out to you this once. It is not late, and
though it were, there’s nobody to hinder me from stopping out till
after ten, now. But, oh! Mr. Oliver’—breaking out passionately—‘it
was mother herself put the finishing touch to my folly. I had been
wild and flown in her face, and disobeyed her, but I was not bad,
when she turned me from my father’s door, and locked it in my face.
She has herself to thank for what came of it,—no, no, I don’t mean
that’—cried ’Mily, calling herself back with an accent of terror in
her despair—‘What is it the Bible says about them as curses father and
mother? And it is only them as honours father and mother that lives
long; so that any way I’m booked to die young like Jack Dadd and Fan—I
beg your pardon, Mr. Oliver—Mrs. Harry Stanhope. Well, I’ve got an
inkling there are worse fates going. But it was heartless and ill-done
of me,’ confessed poor ’Mily, with something like real contrition in
the tears which welled up into her round eyes,—‘to come forward and
look in your face, and at the band round your hat, and begin with my
idle nonsense—only it’s such sore nonsense now-a-days—you can’t guess,
Mr. Oliver. Did you ever think it would come to this—that my banns
should be put up here, in Friarton, and my marriage day next week, yet
neither mother, nor ’Liza, nor any of them, should care to come near
me? That they should not be able to tell what I’m to wear, or seek to
bid me good-bye before I go?’

‘It will be better when you are gone,’ said Oliver. ‘Forgiveness and
forgetfulness will come in time. You will try to do your best, ’Mily,
God helping you, in the future, and when you come back——’

‘I’ll never come back, never,’ said ’Mily, with strong conviction.
‘I’ll never show my face here again, though I’ve sought to look as if
I did not care that I had met the disgrace, I deserved, I suppose. But
you’ll come to my marriage, Mr. Oliver,’ pleaded ’Mily, ‘and wish me
the best that can happen to me, now? Birt will be pleased, because of
your college breeding and connections, and will think more of me since
a gentleman like you does not hold it beneath him to stand by me. And
you will tell them at home some day, Mr. Oliver, what I wore—you’ll
take a good stare at my bonnet and gown for the purpose—and how I
looked, and that I had taken care, as far as I could, out of the little
bit of money my aunt ’Mily, as was also my godmother, left me, that
everything about the marriage should be as slap-bang as the Cobbes
could manage it? No doubt mother’s daughter, considering what mother
has made of the shop, and what her bank-book comes to, might have been
entitled to a great deal more. I know I used to fancy I might be
married in a white satin and go off in a carriage and pair at least,’
replied ’Mily, half-proudly, half ruefully; ‘still you’ll see there
will be nothing in the way the marriage is gone about, to affront
mother and the rest—though none of them has come to look after my
credit and theirs,’ ended ’Mily, with a considerable flavour of the old
woman lingering about her still.




                             CHAPTER XXXI.

                            LIFE—AND DEATH.


Jack Dadd was more like a girl than ever—more like even than the
puniest of pink and white complexioned lads—with whom to associate the
idea of a bold, rude, fox-hunter or a slashing soldier, or a reckless
buccaneer, as they had been represented in Jack’s favourite songs,
would have been the height of absurdity, pathetic in the very wildness
of the imagination.

He was wasted and worn to skin and bone, and faded to the colour of
blanched wax, lying with his eyes shut, though he was not sleeping. Yet
Jack was considered to have got the turn, to be in a fair, though still
a precarious, way of recovery. Oliver had not altogether resigned his
functions; he was with Jack this night again, sitting reading at a
little distance from the bed, when he was startled by hearing a piping
voice address him, and looking round, he saw Jack’s eyes wide open,
with reason in their glance, fixed upon him. It was a critical moment,
for between delirium and sheer feebleness, Jack had not before shown
any consciousness of Oliver’s identity.

‘Noll,’ said Jack, ‘don’t you remember how I won your taws that time?’
referring to a famous, far-off, game of marbles in the Friarton
playground.

Oliver was immensely relieved. ‘Yes, Jack, you beat me to sticks,’ he
admitted candidly, while Jack emitted the ghost of a chuckle at the
recollection of his old victory.

But Jack’s next speech was not so reassuring. ‘Constable,’ said Jack,
‘I’ve often been guilty of rank impudence to you.’

‘Gammon!’ said Oliver; ‘shut up for the rest of the night, old boy; let
me turn you round, and do you try and get another sleep, which will set
you on your pins again in no time, and let me finish my book.’

But Jack’s hour for conversation had come, and he would not be
silenced. ‘I say, Constable, I hope I may get over this bout, and
be let off this time, to live and make up for some things I’ve done
unlike—unlike a gentleman.’

Heaven help the lad! who was too shy in the middle of his forwardness
to say a Christian, the young counter-jumper who had his own standard
for a man and a gentleman.

‘You may live to behave like a prince, Jack, if you’ll only be careful
and not exhaust yourself. Here; swallow this stuff, and snooze away.’

But Jack was at his confessions again, more briskly than before,
the moment he had taken the stimulant. ‘I wonder if anybody but the
poor old guv’nor, and the mother, and perhaps a good fellow like
you, Constable, would care whether I hopped the twig or not? I don’t
deserve it from some people. There’s ’Liza—’Liza Polley—’Liza might
not have always known her own mind, or rather, her friends went in and
bamboozled her, and put a lot of nonsense into her head, but I was not
quite fair to ’Liza. I came down hard upon her, when, as it turned out,
you were not going after her, and when, if you will believe me,’ said
Jack, with emphasis, succeeding in raising himself on his elbow, ‘she
never cared a rap for you, it was me she cared for all the time—poor
’Liza!’ ended Jack, falling back with a sigh.

The delicious _naïveté_ of the assertion pleased Oliver greatly, while
he hastened to give it a handsome corroboration. ‘I am profoundly
convinced of the truth of what you say, Jack; and if it would not bring
on a fresh attack of fever, I might generously tell you in return that
Miss ’Liza Polley met me at break of day the other morning, daring the
wrath of her mother, just to hear the last news of your health.’

‘Did she, though?’ exclaimed Jack, with his poor face brightening into
a dim glow of satisfaction; ‘and ’Liza is as frightened as a hare while
her mother has been like a she-bear that has been robbed of her whelps,
since she sent ’Mily up the spout.’ There was a little pause. Oliver
hoped Jack was dropping off to sleep. ‘I’ll not forget it of ’Liza
Polley,’ Jack spoke again, with drowsy, lordly magnanimity; ‘it was
the best errand she ever ran on. I’ll act on the square to her—on the
square all round, please God. And as for Mrs. Polley, won’t the guv’nor
make her squeak to a different tune, when he calls to pop the question
to the mother for me?’

Yes, Jack was going to recover, to be a man instead of a boy—a good
man ‘please God,’ as he had said simply. And it would please the Father
of Lights, the source and the reward of all goodness.

Death and desolation were distanced for once. The strange, sad sights,
sounds, and memories which the King of Terrors, even though his sceptre
has been wrested from his grasp, still brings with him, and leaves
behind him wherever his ‘pale feet’ pass, would be changed for the
cheery, sweet, common tokens of returning health and life: the fresh,
open air, everyday work, the familiar faces of friends no longer
anxious or averted.

Oliver felt it like a great boon to himself. He went to ’Mily Polley’s
marriage with much better spirit and hope, since there was no longer
the least probability of his having to attend Jack Dadd’s funeral.

Oliver represented ’Mily’s circle, though Sam Cobbe gave her away. An
old friend lent her his countenance when she needed it. For she was
conscience-stricken and shame-smitten through all her defiance. She was
really smarting keenly under the abandonment of her kindred. She was
awaking silently—and when had ’Mily ever been silent before?—and sadly,
already, even before he had made her his wife, to the utter poverty and
short-lived nature of the passion which had existed between her and the
man for whom she had—not generously but wilfully, sacrificed all that
women hold dear. For this reason she was susceptible to the compliment
of Oliver’s presence even more than to the show of her gaudy blue silk
gown and desperately smart bonnet and veil. She thanked him with an
earnestness which struck Oliver in ’Mily, and which he considered far
out of proportion to the cause of the thanks, in the last words she
said to him. She went with her husband straight from the church to the
railway-station, as the Cobbes could not be expected to furnish the
shabbiest version of a wedding-breakfast, and left immediately for
Manchester. There was no trace of the couple when Oliver followed them
to the station in the course of a quarter of an hour, intending to take
a short journey on his own affairs.

Oliver Constable had his foot on a carriage step when the
station-master hurried up, white and scared-looking, struggling to
maintain his composure. He whispered to Oliver, ‘There’s been an
accident to the 11.30 train north, close to Medlar Bridge. I’ve just
had word. There’s folk hurt. All that can help is wanted immediately;
but there’s no use driving the town wild, and bringing out a pack of
useless, frantic people as long as it can be prevented. Would you mind,
sir, coming with me and the nearest doctor and the surface-men?’

‘All right,’ consented Oliver, in reference to what was evidently all
wrong. He, too, was agitated by the suddenness and shock of the message.

It was not till the little party had started and aroused the suspicion
of a few idlers, though another quarter of an hour would pass before
the vague alarm took shape, spread abroad and thrilled the town, that
Oliver recollected the 11.30 train north was the very train by which
the newly-married pair were to travel. He told himself the next moment
that amongst the hundreds in the train there was little likelihood that
the Birts should be the particular victims.

The place where the last portion of the train had run off the line,
with the usual amount of overthrow and wreck, lay about midway
between Friarton and the next station, from which assistance had
already come, before the Friarton station-master and his band of
helpers arrived. Oliver saw only the _débris_ of broken carriages
and a throng of excited but uninjured people, when he leapt from the
engine, on reaching his destination. ‘Not so bad as had been feared
from the earliest report,’ Oliver heard proclaimed by various voices
immediately. Two of the smashed carriages were found to have been
empty. Only one carriage and the guard’s van were occupied. A woman had
been killed, and five or six persons more or less hurt.’

Oliver Constable passed through the eager speakers, looking on every
side for the Birts, half expecting to find ’Mily in hysterics if she
had happened to be in a carriage near those which had broken loose, and
if she had seen anything of the accident.

Before he was aware he found himself close to the waiting-room into
which the sufferers had been carried. A railway servant at the door,
taking it for granted that Oliver was seeking for the room and had a
right to enter, beckoned him in before he could think where he was
going, among the doctors and their patients—fainting or groaning, while
pulses were felt, heads bandaged, and limbs set.

Oliver prepared to retreat, but first he cast a quick glance round.
Stay! Was not that Birt in the soiled, jaunty new clothes for which
’Mily had paid, out of her little bit of money?

The man did not look much the worse, in spite of the outcry he was
making over what a doctor was coolly pooh-poohing as a trifle of a
broken collar-bone.

But where was ’Mily?

In another moment Oliver learnt the incredible fact that Birt did not
know. The bridegroom had been smoking with the guard in the van when
the accident happened, and ever since then—speaking from Birt’s point
of view—he had been in far too bad a way to enquire after anybody. But
no doubt she was somewhere outside, gaping and screeching with the
rest of the women. She ought to be looked up at once—Birt grumbled
crossly, taking the first word of scolding—to see if she could not make
a beginning in minding her duty, and trying to do something for him
when he was in mortal agony and as sick as a dog.

Oliver, with his heart standing still, took one step towards the door
of another room which was kept closed. An elderly woman turned the key
in the lock and let him go in. Alas! yes; there lay all that was mortal
of ’Mily, the poor mangled body decently composed, covered over and
put away from fascinated, appalled gaze, or rude, gloating scrutiny—in
the very dress she had so often pictured herself as wearing, that she
had bidden Oliver notice particularly, which she had, not three hours
before, gone to church in. The chubby face was little altered, except
for the closed eyes, since it had been spared, while death must have
proved instantaneous. With no friend by her side, not missed, though
she was in her bridal glory, till Oliver sought her out, the disastrous
end of ’Mily’s foolish young life had indeed come swiftly.

In the grief and oppression with which Oliver set about making the
necessary arrangements, he could yet believe that, as ’Mily had said of
Fan’s fate, so her own might have been more miserable still.

It was a wise choice made by the warrior and poet king—rather to fall
into God’s than into man’s hands. To die in an instant, though it were
on her marriage morning, in her bridal finery, when her heart was
softened in the act of quitting Friarton, thinking as she thought in
all probability—with regretful tenderness of her mother and family, and
repenting of her misconduct, while, at the same time, all faith and
hope in her husband had not been crushed out of her, was surely better
than to live on at the mercy of a man like Birt, to be dragged down by
him into lower and lower depths, to risk becoming at last as heartless
and worthless as himself.

Oliver had a worse ordeal to face before night than that of seeking out
’Mily on her marriage day, as the woman killed in the railway accident.

Mrs. Polley sent over an express to Friarton Mill to bid Mr. Constable
come into the town and speak to her. In other circumstances it would
have been an exacting, unreasonable demand; as it was Oliver, like any
man with a true man’s heart, obeyed it as he would have obeyed the
behest of the Queen.

He found the Polleys’ shop with the shutters up in the middle of the
afternoon, for the first time in his recollection. Mrs. Polley was
not in the back shop; she was in her daughters’ room, to which she
had gone, with rapid unsteady feet, the moment a rash or stolid
customer had pushed forward to the counter, and, in place of giving
an order, had told the tragedy in all its raw anguish and frightful
force, without waiting to weigh words, or to secure the presence of
some solemnly commissioned, skilled, and pitying comforter. The mother
was sitting by the side of the bed in which ’Mily had been wont to
sleep. Mrs. Polley’s hard-working hand was mechanically smoothing down
the crochet quilt, which had been one of the few feats of industry
accomplished by the joint efforts of the sisters while they were still
at school, and in which ’Mily, though the youngest, had played the
foremost part. The first married of the three workers was to have
carried off the quilt, but the bargain had not been kept in spite of
’Mily’s double title to the prize.

The heavy flush had not grown lighter on Mrs. Polley’s cheeks. She
continued dry-eyed and silent, while all the eyes around her were dim,
and the faces swollen with crying, and as Oliver—the last person there
who had seen and spoken with ’Mily—entered the room, a fresh burst of
lamentation broke from her sisters, even her father groaned aloud, and
bowed his face over his shaking hands.

Oliver took Mrs. Polley’s hand reverently. ‘I am very sorry,’ he
muttered. ‘She could not have suffered. She is in better hands even
than in those of the friends who loved her best. I have done all that
was required.’

‘Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, in a loud, harsh voice which startled
everybody, ‘I have sent for you in case I should not live another
night. How do I know when them as I’ve seen full of youth and life and
gladness is took in the twinkling of an eye? I want to thank you before
I die, and I may never have another chance. Yes, I know all you have
done for my ’Mily this day. You have stood beside her—both as a bride
and as a corpse. When every friend she had gave my gal up, and left her
to be despised and trodden upon, when the mother as bore and had turned
her adrift, that so her folly might grow into sin, showed no mercy, you
came to her and let her feel she had one friend left on earth, so that
she might be able to believe that she had still a Father and Saviour
in heaven. You have ordered her coffin and undertook, if necessary, to
pay for it, and are ready to see all that the cruel, grinding, tearing
wheels left of her, laid in it, and to help to carry her yourself to
the churchyard. Mr. Oliver, my thanks ain’t worth much; for aught that
I know, they may be no better than ill wishes and curses, since I was
the unnatural mother as shut ’Mily out into the street, where she had
no refuge, save the base villain that had decoyed her from her mother’s
roof. Hold your tongue, Polley, and you gals, and you, sir, though you
were thrice my pastor,’ addressing Mr. Holland, as he came softly and
sorrowfully into the room. She resisted fiercely all attempts of her
frightened husband and children and the other awed bystanders to stay
her wild self-accusation. ‘I will speak out. I’ve sung my own praises
and been my own trumpeter many’s the time. I’ll publish likewise my
barbarous cruelty. It was I as denounced my own daughter and condemned
her to destruction and an early grave. So what would it serve you, Mr.
Oliver, though you were to let me go down on my knees and bless you,
because you had more pity on my ’Mily—my bright, clever ’Mily, that is
now as cold and still as a clod of the walley, than her wicked mother
had on her poor, thoughtless child?’

‘You loved her better than yourself, all the time you blamed her most,’
Oliver told the miserable woman. ‘It was your very love for her, and
pride in her, which made you hard. She knew that then; she knows it
better now.’

Something in the words spoken almost at random, opened the closed
floodgate of tears which quenched the frenzy blazing into a devouring
flame, and saved the stout heart from breaking. ‘Yes, I were fond
and proud of my ’Mily, with good reason,’ protested Mrs. Polley more
softly, though the softness was expressed by the deep sobs which rent
her breast, and the torrents of tears that gushed from her eyes. ‘There
was none of the other gals fit to hold a candle to her. She were that
smart, my little ’Mily, she could run and speak by the time she was
eighteen months. I’ve seen her a sitting up rosy and full of roguery,
playing with the pillows in this here bed, when other children would
have been lying like so many little logses. Her fingers and her tongue
alike were that clever! She had finished her piece and begun another of
this very bed quilt long before Ann or ’Liza had got half through with
either of theirs—and her the youngest and only in her first quarter at
the school. “I’ll make them stand about, mother, she would say to me,”
with one of her merry laughs; “and I’ll wager I’ll be married first, as
well as first done with my bit of the crochet, and get the quilt all to
myself.” So she has been married first, and she has died first, leaving
me and her father behind, as ought by rights to have gone long before
her. Oh! ’Mily, ’Mily, if I could but have died for you!’

Poor young ’Mily Polley’s death on her marriage morning caused a great
revulsion in the feelings which had been entertained towards her in
her native town. Her awful fate wiped out, in human eyes, the sum of
her transgressions. Her death was regarded—not so much in the light
of retribution as of atonement. A tender veil of commiseration and
charity was drawn over her offences till they were in a fair way to
be forgotten as well as forgiven. Her memory was likely to survive in
Friarton and appeal to all gentle, romantic hearts for generations to
come—not as that of the erring girl, but as that of the newly-made wife
who perished in the first hours of her wifehood.

’Mily’s intimate associates were forced to acknowledge remorsefully the
little allowance they had made for her temptations, and the unanimity
with which they had forsaken her in her humiliation.

Even some of the townspeople who had only noticed and inveighed against
the girl as an exceedingly vulgar, pert, giddy creature, experienced an
uncomfortable conviction that her opportunities of learning to become
more civilised, modest, and steady had been limited, and, such as
they were, might have been a good deal counteracted by the old feuds
and jealousies between classes. At the same time the blithe ring of
her voice as it had floated accidentally to them, the light fall of
her footstep when she had passed them, lingered in the ears of these
judges, and smote them with the realisation of how young this ’Mily
Polley must have been, when her detractors had not thought it beneath
their superior age, rank, and refinement, to enlarge on her sins
against good taste. ’Mily had her revenge in this fact, that whereas
she and her set had been heartily despised, sharply ridiculed, and
religiously shunned by those more gently bred ladies of Friarton, who
held it as a pious duty to work for, bear with, instruct and assist the
laziest and most reckless of the poor in the town, very few could now
afford to scorn ’Mily. All except the smallest and grossest minds saw
that the solemnity of death, even without its tragedy—as in ’Mily’s
piteous case—invested the girl with a simple dignity in her grave. But
it was a pity that not more men and women had possessed the larger,
gentler eyes to recognise that the sacredness of life had also bestowed
on her worth and importance—even while she still bounced about her
mother’s shop, and flounced along the streets.

Remorse, in its slightest manifestation of doubt and discontent with
one’s self, is not an agreeable sensation, therefore the townspeople of
Friarton, who, like the rest of the world, greatly preferred to feel at
ease in their own minds, if not gently titillated with a consciousness
of having done their best in the matters of justice and mercy, began
to look around them in order to discover any loophole of escape from
the painful impression that they had been hard and contemptuous to
’Mily Polley and perhaps hounded her on—for girls are sensitive as well
as perverse—to her undoing. They were remarkably successful in their
search. For one man had, as it were, redeemed the humane character of
Friarton. Oliver Constable had paid respect to the girl from the first,
and shown her mercy to the last. He had acted as the representative
of her neighbours, and so removed, in a great measure, the lurking
self-reproach from their consciences. And it was the same Oliver who
had gone in for nursing old Dadd’s son, and pulled him through his
fever.

It did seem as if Oliver Constable had come home from watching by his
sister’s death-bed to save the life of Jack Dadd and to speak a parting
word of forgiveness and God-speed to ’Mily Polley, so as to deliver
the whole town from the charge of selfish cowardice and intolerant
persecution. If so, what sort of man could he really be who had
received such a commission and given himself to its fulfilment?

The reaction which had set in for poor ’Mily extended to Oliver.
His fellow-townsmen commenced to conceive an altogether different
impression of him, to exalt and make much of him, to canonise him—not
merely before a hundred years had elapsed, but in his very lifetime.
This experience is comparatively rare, still it happens sometimes that
just as men’s sins occasionally go before them to judgment, so men’s
patient continuance in well-doing is observed and awakens a response in
their brethren before death has set its seal to virtue.

In the meantime Oliver was perfectly unaware of the sudden revolution
in the sentiments of the town towards him, so that in place of being
unpopular and lightly esteemed—not to say grossly slandered—he had
sprung at once to the height of popularity and general respect, among
those who were not particularly ashamed of thus turning their coats,
after they had so recently decried and abused their champion and hero.

The only thing which struck Oliver as he walked along the streets of
Friarton, in the drizzle and mud of November, was, that in spite of
the season and the weather, he was constantly meeting friends and
acquaintances, and that not merely everybody had something to say to
him, but that all men and women were in the best humour, overflowing
with geniality, as if they were reflecting June sunshine rather than
November fog.




                             CHAPTER XXXII.

                      ‘DO THEY BELIEVE IN ME NOW?’


Oliver Constable’s announcement that he was retiring from the baking
business had appeared three times in the Friarton weekly newspapers.
The first time it was received with scoffs and sneers, the next it
was met by a troubled silence, the last time it was anticipated by an
urgent protest, though Oliver did not happen to be within hearing. The
earliest result of his advertisement—so far as Oliver knew—came in the
shape of a formal call in the back shop from Jim Hull.

Jim had never entered the premises since he and his nephew ’Arry
set up a rival business. Oliver made no question that Jim came now
with some proposal from the flourishing firm of which he was one of
the representatives, while he indulged in an austere satisfaction at
the realisation of his own prophecies of the certain consequences of
Oliver’s new-fangled, hair-splitting scruples and crotchets. Anyway,
Oliver thought, Jim Hull might have saved himself the trouble. It was
execrable taste in him to come and crow at all, in the circumstances.

‘_Et tu Brute!_’ Oliver said in spirit to his father’s old friend and
servant, who arrived to speak to Oliver of his acknowledged failure,
and to suggest Jim’s nephew’s further rise on Oliver Constable’s
downfall.

Neither did Jim seem to prosper on his heartlessness and
vindictiveness. He looked much older and greyer, and his fine,
well-cut face was all creased over with the wrinkles which had been
just perceptible, here and there, two or three years before. The face
had always looked compact, but now it had a contracted appearance, as
if Jim had got into a habit of setting his few teeth and drawing his
grizzled brows together, by the hour.

‘Master Oliver,’ said Jim hesitatingly, ‘will you not think twice of
this resolution?’

‘I have no intention, Jim,’ said Oliver shortly, as he drummed on the
table before him; and then, scorning to make use of a subterfuge, he
added, ‘It is not in my power.’

‘Not though I bring you the earliest information that my nephew ’Arry
is also giving up, leastways selling his business here?’ said Jim,
leaning halfway across the table in his earnestness. ‘He has got word
of a famous opening in London, which is a field as will suit him
better,’ said Jim, in a lower tone, sinking back in his chair.

Oliver was taken by surprise. He could only say it would be odd if
Friarton were left without bakers, except the small fry. But there
could be no difficulty in finding a purchaser and successor to such
a _thriving_ business as Jim and his nephew had established. Were
there no other nephews of Jim’s?—Oliver remembered a whole family of
sons, cousins of Harry’s—to take the place of the ambitious fellow who
thought Friarton beneath his further attentions, and would, no doubt,
die Lord Mayor of London? Oliver had—he could not have told why, unless
in the underlying sense of bitterness produced by the contrast with his
own experience—put an emphasis on the epithet ‘thriving’ which he had
applied to Jim and his nephew’s business.

The stress on the word caused Jim to wince. A dull, faded red suffused
the old servant’s withered face, and caused positive pain to the
quondam master. What right had Oliver to taunt Jim with his success?
Was not the old man at liberty to make his methods, in which he saw no
harm, succeed to the utmost of his power?

While Oliver took himself to task, Jim was informing him,
ceremoniously, that the only nephew he had in the baking trade, besides
’Arry, had gone to Australia, ‘and well for him,’ muttered the speaker.
‘But I was thinking, Master Oliver,’ resumed Jim, wistfully, ‘that you
might take ’Arry’s business, of which my share would go far to buy up
the goodwill, and carry it on instead of the old one here.’

‘What, Jim! because I have half ruined myself with the one, go on to
wholly ruin myself with the other?’ said Oliver, with a forced laugh to
hide his perplexity and embarrassment.

‘But things is different,’ insisted Jim eagerly. ‘It were the
opposition—of which there would be no more, not a scrap—as did for you;
and I would manage for you again, if you liked to have me. There’s a
deal more work left in me yet than some folks think for,’ Jim put in
resentful parenthesis, flicking away the remains of flour from his
sleeve. ‘I’m not the man as would advise another man, least of all you,
Master Oliver, if you will believe me, to fling good money after bad;
but here is the finest chance as ever Providence made—on purpose, I had
a’most said, for you to retrieve your losses, and build up Constable’s
business again on a firmer foundation than ever, and carry out your
schemes to boot,’ cried Jim, waxing enthusiastic, ‘if you’ll not go and
fling it to the dogs in a pet.’

Oliver was fairly puzzled. He was a man tenacious of his principles
and projects. So far from being wearied out by disappointment and
thwarting, and glad of the excuse to throw the baking business over, it
‘riled’ him thoroughly, tortured and mortified him, to resign it and
all the hopes he had set upon it, after what they had cost him. He was
strongly tempted to catch at the most distant prospect, consistent
with common prudence, of resuming the trade, and waging it thenceforth
to a triumphant issue, for the benefit of his fellow-men.

But what of the old practical difficulties with Jim? Oliver was
not disposed to yield an atom of what he looked upon as trade
righteousness. Sooner sacrifice half-a-dozen businesses, or promises
of business, than make a holocaust of his trade creed, which was a
prominent part of his Christian creed. Jim, with the hold on his master
which the manager’s having largely contributed to buy back the business
must give him, would be in a position to maintain his opposite views,
while Oliver would no longer have the power to object to them, far less
to put them down.

‘I am greatly obliged to you, Jim,’ said Oliver, at last, ‘and not the
least for this—that, in spite of the mull I have made, you speak as if
you had some faith in me still. But I am not cured of my hobbies; I am
as great a fool as ever, you will think, when I tell you that I cannot
be in business as a baker and suffer artificially-whitened bread, or
fancy bread which is not weighed, to go out of my shop. Besides, I do
not know what other eccentricities might occur to me, which I should
feel bound to see carried out.’

Instead of the half-repressed disgust which Oliver had expected to
excite, Jim met the declaration with a shame-faced assent. ‘Never mind,
Master Oliver, them are trifles after all, and it’s erring on the safe
side. Yes, sir, I’m bound to say to you this much—it’s erring on the
safe side,’ raising his voice, and speaking sternly, while he fumbled
nervously with his watch-chain.

With the exception of another abrupt sentence, ‘I’ll swallow all your
stipulations, and stick to you like a vice, now, Master Oliver, never
fear,’ it was all the admission Jim Hull ever made to Oliver of having
found himself the wrong man in the wrong place. But it was enough to
recall to Oliver’s mind stories he had heard, only half believed and
never repeated, of the sort of bread which the new business had gone
on to sell in Friarton. A young doctor, who had taken upon himself
the office of unpaid analyst in defence of an ungrateful public, had
pronounced the bread largely and most perniciously adulterated. ’Arry
had advanced a long way before his sickened and horrified uncle in
courses which Jim had found himself utterly unable to restrain to mild,
half-openly-confessed, traditional trade liberties. London was indeed a
fitter field for ’Arry’s genius.

The day has long gone by when the outbreak of deadly epidemics aroused
the frantic outcry of poisoned wells and poisoned loaves. But are the
water and the bread provided for the people really pure and wholesome?
Has the time not come for the old charge to be revived in more
measured and reasonable tones, without any thought of vengeance on sins
which are those of ignorance—however wilful—sloth, and haste to make
rich, not of deliberate conspiracy and barbarous treachery against
human health and life?

‘But, Jim, though you consent to bear with my fads, I am afraid the
Friarton people will still find them insupportable. They will still
clamour for bread of chalky whiteness, varying in size as well as in
shape. I have wearied them out with my efforts to be honest and do them
good against their will.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ said Jim decisively. ‘No one will wag a finger
against your bread. They have come to know better. Bless you! they are
ready to swallow wholesale any stuff you may offer them.’

Oliver stared, then thinking Jim was making another covert allusion
to his nephew’s tolerably extensive experiments on the palates and
digestive organs of his customers, Oliver delicately waived the point
in discussion.

Oliver Constable and Jim Hull talked for some time on the
practicability of Oliver’s stepping into a vigorous business in place
of laying down an exhausted trade. The longer they talked, the more
Oliver became satisfied of the possibility and advisability of the
proceeding—that the career he had proposed for himself might not be cut
short, and that he might have the chance of rising like a phœnix from
its ashes.

The last thing which vexed Oliver was that Jim pressed him to go in
for the new premises—reared by Jim and his nephew—which were in full
working order, rather than transfer their business to the Constables’
bakehouse and shop, which had latterly been only half used.

What! Give up the shop Peter Constable had proudly built for his son,
which Agneta Stanhope had foolishly called ‘the ancestral shop,’ with
all the kindly associations to which Oliver was so susceptible, and
remove into these brand-new premises, destitute of any association
except that they had been raised to knock down the other, which they
had done!

Yet all was true that Jim argued. Time and tide were sweeping away the
old traffic from the old channels. The new premises were in a better
situation than Oliver’s. They had commanded ampler space and secured
freer ventilation. They were more commodious and convenient. The spot
on which Peter Constable built his shop had long been looked on with
a covetous eye by those public-spirited citizens of Friarton who held
that the town should have a new town-hall worthier of the name than
that in which Oliver had delivered his lecture on Wordsworth, and
Lady Cicely Hartley had been a stall-keeper in a bazaar. The town was
flourishing in funds at the present moment, and the talk about the
town-hall was actually passing into deed. If Oliver were to sell
the piece of ground on which his shop and bakehouse stood to the new
town-hall committee, his exchequer would at once be considerably
replenished. There was no resemblance between the shop and bakehouse
and Naboth’s vineyard. The former had seen their day and effected their
purpose. Peter Constable would have been the first to pat his son on
the shoulder and enjoin him, ‘Sell, my boy; sell when it is wise and
right to do it. My memorial, my idea! Never mind them. Would I have had
them stand in the way of your progress, which is the progress of your
work? They have taken care of themselves hitherto, they will live again
like everything which has real vitality in it, in a new mould, shaped
to the fresh needs of a later day.’

The treaty in hand between Oliver and Jim Hull was still unsuspected in
Friarton when Oliver found his back shop and his leisure a second time
invaded—not by delegates from his journeymen bakers; truth to tell,
they were the last to comprehend intelligently and to give in anything
like a cordial adherence to their master. It was a deputation from his
fellow-tradesmen that next waited upon Oliver. The party consisted of
old Dadd, Polley, who had enough manhood for a deputation in which his
wife’s bonnet and gown would have looked out of place, and another
shopkeeper—the saddler, whose bill to Harry Stanhope Oliver had taken
care should be paid in full.

They were so occupied with the ceremoniousness of their mission that
Oliver could hardly get them to sit down or put their hats out of their
hands; and old Dadd, who was the leader, kept saying ‘sir’ to Oliver
at every other word. They had not come to ask the miller and baker
to go into the vestry or council as a step to becoming churchwarden
or mayor. They had no notion of giving him a dinner or a piece of
plate—solutions to the formal visit which, luckily, never crossed
Oliver’s mind. They had come to more purpose.

These tradesmen—representing very nearly the whole shopkeepers of
Friarton—the deputation had furnished themselves with a list of the
names—were there to beg Oliver to withdraw his announcement of retiring
from business. ‘We feel, sir, you are an honour to our order,’ said
old Dadd, with as much spirit as if it were an order of knighthood.
‘Sir, we mayn’t all see with your eyes, or be prepared to carry out
your views to a _t_, but we do see they does you great credit. We are
quite sure, sir, the world and trade in the long run, would be none the
worse of a few more gents like you in them. So, Mr. Oliver, to retain
you among us, we, your fellow-shopkeepers in this here town, ’umbly and
’eartily solicit you to keep on your late worthy father’s business.
And we are here, sir, in a body, or as the representatives of a body,
to pledge you our support in such plain reforms and improvements as
you think fit to introduce. We ask you to excuse us for not being wide
awake to their crying necessity from the first. Sir, men could not
speak fairer,’ wound up Dadd, in some elation at his own eloquence.

There was more behind. This flattering petition came from the general
body of the shopkeepers, stirred up by their leaders, who, in their
private capacities, had something else to say. It was Dadd, again, who
acted as their mouthpiece, and, though not quite so fluent, was as
fervent and ’earty as before. He remarked, abruptly, there were some
favours no man with a heart in his breast could think of repaying, to
which sentiment Policy chorussed incoherently, ‘No, nor no woman with a
heart in her bosom—quite so, quite so, Mr. Dadd.’ Then old Dadd went
on to press on Oliver, in the friendliest, most considerate manner,
such an advance in money as these three could afford, to tide him over
the temporary difficulties which might have induced him to give up the
baking business.

It was all clear to Oliver at last, while he shrugged his shoulders,
grimaced fearfully, and stammered out his thanks, assuring the
gentlemen there was no occasion for their last act of friendship, but
he would never forget their generous sympathy and confidence, never.
The truth was it warmed his heart, and he was not at all sure that if
he had gone on to say this was the proudest moment of his life, there
would have been the least hypocrisy in the trite hyperbole in his case.

Yes, it was pleasant to have won some appreciation—however little
deserved—from his fellow-townsmen, who ought to know him best, to be
assured that they gave him credit, after all, for meaning well.

The nature of the acknowledgment touched and softened Oliver more than
he could express. He wished his father and Fan might know it. As he
went out into the streets afterwards, he was sensible of breathing
another air, of his face being irradiated with a different light.
He was no longer surprised that he encountered so many friends, and
that they were all so friendly. Of course they must see he felt that
everybody was almost intolerably kind, till he could have wished
they would not come round a beggar so, and demoralise him with their
kindness. ‘Do they believe in me now?’ Oliver was saying to himself,
half sadly, in the midst of his gladness, half incredulously still.

Oliver’s feet, like fate, at this crisis, carried him in the direction
of the Meadows. All danger of infection from Jack Dadd’s fever was
over, and nothing could be more salutary for the reformer, to prevent
his losing his head altogether, than the cold douche of Mrs. Hilliard’s
laughter, and Catherine’s indifference, in contradiction to the absurd
excitement of the rest of the inhabitants of Friarton.

But the instant he was shown into the Meadows’ drawing-room—cheery even
on a November day, Oliver discovered that the antidote he was seeking
was useless, or rather that there was no such corrective. The town’s
dilatory admiration and gratitude were there before him, in all the
excess in which they might be expected from women. Mrs. Hilliard’s
inveterate jests sounded very much as if they were uttered to save
herself from breaking down, and her jolly voice grew shaky when she
asked after Fan’s baby.

With regard to Catherine, she might still have been silent and stiff,
had she not been penetrated, stirred to the depths of her nature, and
spurred on by a full share of the public feeling. So much so, that
when they were giving Oliver tea and he had cunningly worked round
the conversation to a neutral topic—the new orders of nurses and the
new theories of nursing—Catherine, her pale eager face, and eyes
alight and aglow, with an expression which had all at once acquired a
certain likeness to Fan’s, suddenly turned round on him and told him
barefacedly, with the clearest personal application—Sister Elizabeth’s
opinion was that her own work was good, but it was a better and nobler
work to prevent the evils which took such costly sacrifices to cure
them. When a man stood to his post, laboured to clear away his share of
the abuses which had crept into all trades, and called nothing common
and unclean—that was preventing great and widespread evils.

‘Oh, Gemini!’ groaned Oliver, gathering up his long legs in a
marvellous coil which would have done credit to the brothers Davenport,
‘don’t you two go in with the others to make a fool and a hero of me!’

‘Who shall prevent us?’ cried Mrs. Hilliard. ‘If the town take it into
its thick head to give you its freedom on an exquisitely illuminated
card—the illumination done by the most accomplished young lady in the
place—or if it think fit to crown you with an olive-wreath covered with
goldbeater’s leaf, you will have to submit. It would never do for you
to be ungracious, that would spoil everything.’

‘Then don’t let the town take it into its head. Upon the whole, you had
better all suffer me to go away in peace, before you recover from your
delusion.’

‘It is not now we are deluded,’ said Catherine. ‘Our eyes have been
opened, so that we—some of us, no longer see men and women—not so much
like trees walking, but as hideous caricatures. We see plain at last,
and recognise our kind—our kin, God-sib—our gossips, if you will, as
God made them, through what they have made themselves, or what their
neighbours have consented to make them. Do you think so lightly of
us as to imagine we shall ever forget the sight? Do you not know it
is like life from the dead to recognise brothers and sisters—a great
multitude which no man could number, wherever we turn? No, you will not
have the heart to go away from Friarton,’ she finished, in a lower tone
which was still audible to him, as she played with her spoon, ‘just
when we are beginning to understand, and when God is going to show you
the work of your hands, and to establish it.’

Oliver made an excuse to cross the room with his cup. On his return to
his seat, he paused behind Catherine Hilliard’s chair, and said for her
ear alone, ‘Take care, Catherine, or else you will be more cruel in the
end than in the beginning.’

‘Have I been cruel?’ she asked, drawing back shyly. But this was the
season of settling accounts, and he deserved full payment. ‘No, not to
you,’ she whispered tremulously, with a soft smile. ‘If I was cruel, it
was to myself—never to you.’

Mrs. Hilliard entered her protest, later in the evening; for Oliver
stayed to dinner without troubling to go home to dress, and he was
still lingering, talking, as he had never talked in his life before,
after Mrs. Hilliard had reminded him there was such a ceremony as
locking the doors in most households. Then she suggested, ‘If there are
to be two enthusiasts, social reformers, muscular Christians—whatever
you like to call yourselves—instead of one, and I’m sure one was quite
enough to come to grief, what is to become of me, I should like to
know? I shall have a bad time of it, for though Catherine is her own
mistress, there is such a being as an indignant ex-guardian, and I’m
not her sole cousin. When all trades are held alike, and everybody is
respected, half of my occupation will be gone, while my ungrateful
kindred, whom I have suffered to set good, sound long-established
social distinctions at defiance, will never admit a laughing hyena into
their menagerie.’


                           LONDON: PRINTED BY
                 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
                          AND PARLIAMENT STREET




                           Transcriber Notes


  The following are corrections to the original text.
  p108 “markts” changed to (the places and markets).
  p165 added period to end of (Stanhope’s last letter.)
  p240 “backshop” changed to (back shop from Jim Hull.)
  p261 added period to end of (in the beginning.’)


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