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