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.