Italic represented by underscores surrounding the italic text. Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
VOL. II.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
MILLER AND BAKER
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. II.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1880
[All rights reserved]
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
XI. OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD 1
XII. HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A YEOMAN 27
XIII. OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS CLASS 56
XIV. THE FIRST ATTEMPT 76
XV. THE ANNUAL EXCURSION 101
XVI. THE MIDDLE AND END OF THE FEAST 127
XVII. AGNETA STANHOPE 147
XVIII. OLIVER’S LECTURE ON WORDSWORTH 165
XIX. AN ILLUSION 194
XX. OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL
CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED
OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND
CO. 221
XXI. MUTINY IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE 253
XXII. A REFORMER’S REWARD 272
OLIVER CONSTABLE,
MILLER AND BAKER.
CHAPTER XI.
OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD.
Oliver was happy enough to discover, in the course of an evening call which Jack Dadd paid at the mill-house, that Jack had turned his mind a little in the direction of the rearing of vegetables, and the training and bearing of fruit trees. He had a voice in making the best of his father’s garden. His own name had appeared in the list of successful competitors at the Horticultural Show.
‘Your blockhead of a gardener is making a mess of these artichokes, and your medlar don’t carry half the crop it ought to;’ Jack found fault in his free and easy style, as Oliver and he were strolling in the garden, while Fan sat in solitary dignity within doors.
‘Very likely,’ Oliver answered, philosophically at first; and then he proposed quickly, ‘Give us a lesson, Dadd?’
‘You ain’t above taking it,’ said Jack Dadd, nodding, ‘though your ass of a man may be. But you don’t suppose I’m going to put a spoke in my own wheel, by telling you how to be my successful rival at the show?’
Jack was not in earnest in his refusal, for he was naturally obliging and good-natured, while dealing with customers who were mostly women gave him a habit of civility. But he considered it smart and out of shop to appear knowing, selfish, and blustering, just as he reckoned it spirited and dashing to use bad language on occasions, without entering much into the meaning of the words. Oliver had fallen out of knowledge of the lad, and was not certain either of his simplicity or his affectation, so he changed a little in his tack.
‘What would you say to setting up a field naturalists’ society in Friarton, and having occasional excursions to furnish a correct catalogue of the flora of this district of England—not a bad district for the purpose?’ suggested Oliver.
Oliver’s mind had gone off to a version of the pursuit of herbs in which there should be only the mildest species of rivalry. ‘If we were to tramp whole days,’ he said to himself sanguinely, after what he half hoped was an inspiration, ‘over pastures, through woods, and down the centre of ditches, crying “Eureka!” with one consent, when we came upon an outlying specimen of nettle, we should assuredly hob-nob together before we had gone out three times.’
‘Oh! bother, no,’ said Jack, throwing a bucketful of cold water on the first spark of the project. ‘There is some sense in growing vegetables and fruit, and even garden flowers—though the breakjaw names of the last is enough to stop the business—I mean, of course, the last things out in the flower line, for nobody cares about the poor old things that had no show along with their scent, like cottage bonnets and short skirts, which mother will tell you were so modest and tidy. But to take the trouble to hunt up and nickname weeds, I call sheer waste of body and mind, fit only for pottering gentlefolks, schoolmasters, and fogies of that kidney, or for your would be geniuses among the working-men. You would have a pretty sprinkling of the lowest ruck wanting an excuse to be off from a day’s work, and expecting you to pay them for joining your society. I tell you, Constable, it don’t pay—either him or anyone else—to take a working-man from his work and set him up as a genius. Just you see how it would answer with your bakers. Besides, I, for one, don’t care for being mixed up with every blacksmith and carter who takes it into his conceited noddle that he has a turn for gathering weeds and storing trash.’ And Jack strutted a little as he walked, and puffed out his pink and white cheeks.
‘You are wrong,’ maintained Oliver, ‘and more’s the pity for the other ways in which a working-man spends his holiday. But look here, Jack, you meet him in the cricket-field?’
‘Oh! that is different,’ said young Dadd, carelessly. ‘That is an understood thing. But as for my club, we have only a young weaver and a shoemaker or two able to bat and bowl at our evening practice. The working-man who lives by his cart-horse sinews is mostly too tired for any place save the alehouse, after six o’clock.’
In spite of the slightness of the encouragement he had received, Oliver did feel his way to originating a field naturalists’ society. He sounded his own millers and bakers, and discovered no Robert Dick among them; none went in for weeds. However, in his search, Oliver hit on a stalwart journeyman in his service, who had a small taste for butterflies. Oliver himself had no elegant scientific bent in this direction, but he introduced his baker to the ancient keeper of an ancient, dusty, mouldy, and well-nigh forgotten museum in the town. True, the keeper, in the neglect and oblivion which had fallen upon his charge, had lapsed into hopeless indifference and absolute infidelity to his trust: but he was sufficiently moved by the strange event of a visitor—a pupil—however humble, to the museum, not only to furbish up the remains of what had once been a creditable display of native and foreign butterflies, in the entomological cases, he showed a salutary sense of shame, by volunteering to make a report to the survivors of the committee, who had mismanaged the affairs of the museum, for the purpose of inducing them to employ a portion of the small fund which still remained at their disposal, to pay the young baker to replace the native ‘peacocks’ and ‘emperors,’ that had dropped and crumbled from their pins.
Oliver fondly flattered himself that he had done some good in this quarter. But unfortunately, the big young baker was of a self-conscious, sensitive disposition. He was abashed by the sudden favourable notice of a pursuit, which, though he had fallen into it, he had always been accustomed to look upon as very much the childish folly his companions held it to be. He allowed himself to be overcome by the half-jealous chaff which went on in the shop at the result of the jeering information which some of the men had volunteered to give their master. The unfortunate admirer of butterflies began to hate the mention even of a beetle or a bumble-bee. He doggedly declined to have anything to do with refilling the cases in the museum. He showed Oliver, in a nervous but unmistakable manner, that the man would have none of the master’s sympathy, and took refuge in the skittle-ground nearest to his lodgings, that he might not be tempted into the fields, and betrayed into the absurdity of butterfly-hunting, thus destroying the esprit de corps between him and his brother-bakers, and alienating them from his side. Oliver’s small amount of good done effervesced in harm. And when a letter in the ‘Friarton News’ only bore the fruit of several more or less cordial and enthusiastic replies from those ‘pottering gentlefolks,’ schoolmasters, and a working-man or two, of whom Jack Dadd had spoken, Oliver withdrew from the scheme, leaving the members who had suggested themselves to render it an accomplished fact and to include in the society—if they had the wisdom to extend their bounds in that direction, all the idle young ladies in the neighbourhood—who were not too fastidious, or too delicate, or too lazy to enter the ranks, and to take to making herbariums, in place of playing incessant games of croquet, badminton, or lawn-tennis, whichever happened to be in the ascendant, alternately with district-visiting under the last fascinating curate. They were very well qualified to do this work without him. Oliver was sensible that he might incur the reproach of not knowing his own mind. But he did know it well enough not to be diverted, by a specious and rather agreeable prospect, from his proper purpose. If none of the Dadd and Polley set could be drawn out to study botany, he would let it alone for the present.
The next bright idea which struck Oliver was to join Jack Dadd’s company of volunteers—not that Jack was their captain, but he was an influential member of the corps. He was a tolerably smart soldier, a fair shot, proud of his uniform and of what he had learnt of drill. He might be a greater man in the volunteer ball-room than at a sham fight, but he was honestly possessed with the notion that he was serving his country and forming part of her martial bulwark. For that matter he occasionally terrified his mother by swaggering and threatening, after a tiff with his father, to join any reserved force which should be called abroad.
Oliver was perfectly aware that he could never be what Jack called ‘a dab’ of a soldier, but he was not sure that Jack would not like him the better for his defects. It would be a great nuisance and fatigue to Oliver to walk and hold himself straight and still, like other men, and not to be perpetually in disgrace, but he might try what he could accomplish in bodily self-restraint. It would be what moralists would call ‘good discipline’ for him, at any rate. At the same time he remembered, and even reminded Fan of what he had said to her on the evening of his coming home, as to his being out of place in a barrack yard.
Fan was not too generous to refrain from assenting with grave irony, though she had no particular objection to his joining the company of volunteers, which included men of all ranks, if only Oliver had asserted his claims and got a commission—not put himself on a level with young Dadd. ‘Jack Dadd is odious,’ Fan had said with effusion to Oliver one day, as she recalled the young draper’s loud trousers, tight boots, and ‘light kids,’ when he figured as a ‘Sunday swell.’ Fan also cherished lively recollections of what she had suffered from Jack Dadd on the occasion of a party at the Polleys, which she had been forced to attend soon after leaving school. Jack would not be kept at a distance by any effort of girlish majesty, and when he had happened to sit next to her, he had presumed to administer sundry nudges with his elbow to emphasise points in his conversation, without regard to her stony disregard of the signals.
‘Not a bit,’—Oliver denied the odiousness stoutly; ‘Dadd is not half a bad fellow; he is manly in his way, and though that way may not be good form,’ reflected Oliver, falling inadvertently into school slang, ‘it is not altogether his fault, poor beggar.’
Oliver paid heavy penalties for his ambition, in the Masonic Hall—converted for the nonce into a drill hall—and in the five-acre field, where the volunteers went through their exercise. Discipline alone prevented Jack Dadd and his cronies from roaring and rolling about with laughter at the recruit’s disqualifications and misdemeanours. After many evenings’ enforced attendance and irksome drudgery, at the hall and in the field, and a journey along with some scores of excited men cooped up in the insufficient accommodation of a limited number of railway carriages, followed by a march of several miles through clouds of dust in order to perform a series of wildly entangled evolutions, before a general officer, who smiled grimly at the performance, and marked out Oliver for particular reprobation, Oliver counted disconsolately his gains from the extensive sacrifice of his leisure. He was on easier terms with Jack Dadd and the rest, since they had at least one more subject in common. He was invited as a matter of course, and had, indeed, a right, to join the others in what Jack called their ‘watering,’ and which might more appropriately have been styled their ‘beering,’ and their occasional little suppers at the inns they affected after drill. These young men of the people were not dissipated fellows farther than what was implied by the fact that certain members, like Jack, were inclined to aspire to a flavour of dissipation as an element in manliness. Their gambling was to a very limited extent, though it might reach to the bottom of their slenderly lined purses, in stakes of small silver at the billiard table, which an enterprising Friarton innkeeper had provided for them, as well as for their betters, in addition to cribbage boards and packs of cards. The noise and riot into which the high spirits of the company broke out at times might be a little coarse, but it was not more outrageous than the mad nonsense which Oliver had witnessed, and, sober-minded as he was for the most part, had joined in, occasionally, when well-bred lads met in each other’s rooms on the banks of the Isis. For that matter, its utterance served in both cases as a safety-valve for the exuberance of life, the joy in existence, which soon enough expends itself and is replaced by a burden of care, worry and weariness, even when men stop short of bitterness of heart and despair of spirit.
The pity was that though there were no deans and proctors at Friarton, and though the intervention of the rural Charlies or Bobbies might not be called for, the public of the little town was at once more lynx-eyed and sterner in its judgments. There was far less allowance made for the young plebeians than for the young patricians. Unaccountably and inconsistently, much more was expected from the former than from the latter. Old heads on young shoulders were unhesitatingly demanded in many quarters in the case of the embryo tradesmen, with their poor education, and their slender resources by comparison for occupying their leisure hours. It was hard to say why this inequality of opinion existed, unless the early call of these young shopmen to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and the hand-to-hand struggle of some of them with poverty and privation from their cradles upwards, might be supposed, by an austere necessity, to steady and dignify the lads betimes, not to drive them desperate and impel them to snatch greedily at any small indulgence, however base and fatal, which came within their reach. If this were the explanation, an exceptional though perilous honour was conferred on ‘the counter-jumpers’ when they were expected to be wiser than their fellows.
For Oliver was certain of one thing, that if any draper’s assistant, or saddler or ironmonger’s apprentice, in Friarton happened to be simply intoxicated, not so much with strong drink as with the restless energy and furious mirth of youth in an ebullition that would be treated with tolerant tenderness at a university, and punished by nothing worse than the mild reproof or the nominal fine, which was a trifle light as air to the privileged undergraduate, the young tradesman would be generally set down as drunk with less ethereal liquor. If caught in the act of creating a disturbance so heinous as waking the silent night with hideous clamour, giving chase to a surprised, surrounded, and hustled guardian of the public peace, smashing wantonly a street lamp, or wrenching off ‘maliciously’ a bell or knocker, he would be hailed before a bench of magistrates, and mulcted of a sum out of all proportion to his exchequer. And that was not all. He would have to pay what was for him a far heavier penalty. His character, which was his capital, his chief dependence for work and livelihood, would suffer. His employer, though he had been young himself once, would be so influenced by the magisterial verdict as to begin to lose confidence in his assistant. The inspector of the Sunday or night school in which the lad might have been religiously enough inclined, and sufficiently benevolent to take an interest and have a class, would sharply signify to the offender that he was no credit to the institution, and had better give up his connection with it. The clergyman, receiving the report of the inspector, would not think himself justified in interfering; on the contrary, he, too, would commence to look coldly on his young parishioner. The lad, sunk in his own estimation by the judgment of those he had respected and who ought to know best, slinking away from their condemnation to seek refuge with his fellow-sinners, who could not at least set their faultlessness against his errors, might become the dog with a bad name in a fair way to be hung.
Oliver Constable did not see how the unequal dispensation of justice was to be made even, but he smarted under the sense of it. The smart tempted him to act very much after the fashion of the great Dr. Johnson when the young bucks for whom he had a kindly regard invaded his room at midnight and summoned him to a lark. In like manner and with less solicitation, Oliver remained many an evening in the society of Jack Dadd, and of lads with even fewer hostages to respectability than Jack, and went with them—careless of what people said of his, Oliver’s, taste—in the young tradesmen’s senseless but harmless enough raids through the town, because Oliver Constable believed that his presence was a protection to the others, even more than a check on their erratic proceedings; yet in return for the double support, Oliver’s protégés to a great extent fought shy of him.
In these boyish demonstrations in which he chose to bear a part, Oliver had not the relief of cultured cleverness, some development of which had usually been intermingled with the ‘great fun’ and ‘awful jolliness’ of a gathering of university lads, whose rollicking propensities had not been altogether toned down by blue china and sage-green portières. If at a certain stage of the entertainment, missiles would fly about, howls be resorted to, and batterings of the door indulged in, at another there would occur lively mimicry of the Union speeches; parodies of old classic odes would carry the mind back to Greek and Roman feasts; viewiest of views—transcending the most extravagant speculations of ancient and modern philosophy—would be aired, and would serve at least to show that the young revellers had inherited thoughts and fancies, however crude, as well as the rampant spirits of their years.
But here among the youth of Friarton, which was not golden, or even gilded, a bad style of practical joking and buffoonery—gone out elsewhere save in the worst style of regiment; the boisterous rendering of the mock heroic and still more excruciating comic songs of the lower order of theatres; and a good deal of rude wrangling for lack of a better mode of argument, traversing the horse-play and threatening now and then to terminate in the rowdyism of a free fight, formed the sole alternatives to sheer noise. These young shopmen, who were very ordinary lads, were nearly a century behind their social superiors in superficial civilisation. Oliver used to compare his class sorrowfully to those nations in Europe like the Poles and Hungarians kept back to do the needful work of repelling the hordes of Eastern barbarians, and apparently never able to make up for lost time.
Oliver Constable did not for a moment imagine that the upper classes enjoyed a monopoly or even a predominance of moral and intellectual gifts. But the truth was pressed home upon him painfully, that while genius, which is above all accident of circumstances, and which is its own teacher, is rare, cultivation tells in producing a higher average of second-rate ability, or the specious appearance of it, in the better educated grades of society. And where the matter is not of the best, the manner always plays an overweening part. There did not happen to be a ‘mute inglorious Milton’ in Friarton in those days, so Oliver missed the intelligent echoes of the Marvels and Butlers of the period, which he had been accustomed to hear at Oxford. Even with their aid he had been apt to get tired of youthful gaieties, and to call them intolerably flippant and shallow, but, in contrast with his former experience, the clumsy gambols of the Friarton lads were dull as ditch water. Oliver could not have stood them long, had it not been for the strength of his purpose and that higher humanity which awoke in him such sympathy with his kind, above all with the class in which it seemed to Oliver his chief responsibilities were to be found.
It was slow uphill work to win influence and lull antagonism. Jack Dadd had made use, more than once in Oliver’s hearing, of bad language. Happily for Jack himself, he had no real relish for it; he employed it as an evidence of knowingness and spirit in the light in which many swearers indulged in profane swearing in the great swearing age. Some melancholy prophets report there are ominous symptoms, in high places, of the return of this epoch, but we must humbly trust that the blooming time of blasphemy was a century ago.
At last Oliver interfered: ‘Dadd, will you do me the favour not to say that again in my hearing?’ Oliver requested, quietly.
‘Oh! hang it, Constable, we are not to have any preaching or dictating from you,’ cried young Dadd, colouring up and blustering. ‘If you don’t like our ways, leave ’em alone. We shan’t cringe for your company, of which you have made us a gift, without our asking for it, I may say.’
‘I have not preached or dictated; I appeal to the rest of you fellows,’ said Oliver, without much loss of temper; while the fellows, who had their share of the old English passion for fair play, felt constrained to mumble an assent to the appeal even though it was against the deliverance of their comrade. ‘I asked you to drop that expression as a favour to me,’ repeated Oliver; ‘if you cannot grant the favour, at least you may refuse civilly.’
‘Oh! if you choose to put it in that fashion,’ said Jack, a little sulkily, ‘there is no more to be said; all I meant to object to was any fine fellow’s thinking to come it over us, which I never heard he was invited to do, and taking it upon him to bid us mince our words to suit his delicate stomach.’
But Jack soon forgot his pique, and he made the concession of not repeating the offence within sound of Oliver’s ears, whatever he might utter beyond their reach. Possibly the censure had sunk so far into Jack’s somewhat obtuse mind, that he was rather shaken in the conviction of the embellishment, supplied to his conversation by his sporting the grossest form of oath with which he was acquainted. He might even fall into the innocent delusion of supposing that ugly expletives had ceased to be hurled right and left, in moments of excitement, by choice specimens—according to Jack Dadd’s ideas—of young swells at the universities.
And Jack, with all his pertness and swagger, was not original. He secretly imitated the social superiors he admired and envied in his heart of hearts, while, on the one hand, he was professing among his own set supreme indifference to their claims, and on the other, he knew his own interest too well not to solicit their custom and attend to their needs with the utmost civility.
For poor Jack played a double, nay, a quadruple part. In place of simply regarding his more aristocratic patrons with that combination of proper official outward respect, and individual inward contempt, which his father and mother entertained for them, Jack’s mind was farther divided between the two emotions of loving and loathing equally smothered and nearly equally balanced.
He appreciated keenly, he was impelled to ape, the alluring practices of the very gentlefolks who galled him by making use of him, and, in the case of the younger generation, regarding him with the easy carelessness and laughing scorn, which had replaced the tyranny and arrogance of one decade, and the stately countenance and elaborate benevolence of another. But in the middle of Jack’s small applause and the compliment of his taking his antagonists for models, his good-nature did not keep him from grinding his teeth at their disparaging treatment culminating in the mocking epithet of ‘counter-jumper.’
CHAPTER XII.
HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A YEOMAN.
Harry Stanhope was welcomed with open arms by everybody in Friarton, and Horace was more than tolerated for his brother’s sake. Fan Constable had struck the key-note of public opinion in this England which some people call democratic, when she said that a gentleman ‘generations deep’ could do anything, always supposing he did it with characteristic grace, and win golden opinions on all sides. What Oliver Constable was condemned and ostracised for attempting to do, because he did it out of loyalty to his class, a deep sense of duty to his kind, and the most practical form of Christianity, Harry Stanhope was universally applauded and caressed for trying to accomplish in his burlesque fashion in an idle whim, certainly with no other motive, save that of serving himself and Horry.
It was no matter that Harry far outdid Oliver in the liberty he took with the world of Friarton. Oliver only went to his mill and his shop, seeking to revive his old familiarity with business details, and planning how to bring to bear upon them his version of trade principles. He contented himself with reviving his acquaintance with old friends of the family in a conventional enough way, simply making it plain that he acknowledged their obligations and was content to take his place in their ranks.
But Harry flaunted his descent from the squirearchy to the yeomanry in the most outrageous style. He ‘went the whole hog,’ as he had said. He was like the stage misanthropes who growl and gibe till men doubt their sincerity, only Harry’s blue eyes were too round and limpid for one to suspect them of depths of hypocrisy. He meant everything he did while the fit was upon him. He was in earnest so far as he knew, when, like hermits in general, he went far beyond the original professors in his actions.
Harry with his shadow, Horace, not only dined at twelve, sometimes in the fields in close proximity to his workers, and supped at seven, he made his own hay, whether the sun shone or the rain fell—not to the benefit of the hay in the latter instance, drove his own carts, galloping the cart-horses to the injury of these sober-minded animals, and led the hoers among beans and turnips with an impartial energy which threatened to demolish alike crops and weeds. He laid aside the civilised encumbrance of a morning coat, as if he were engaged in perpetual cricketing and rowing matches. He walked with a pitchfork over his shoulder as some squires carry a spud, when the tool was quite unnecessary. And he did what no yeoman within a radius of many miles of Friarton had thought of doing within the memory of the oldest inhabitant—he came into the town in character, in his shirt-sleeves, riding a bare-backed horse, as he had been taking it to water, when it had flashed across his mind that he might be in time to intercept the post letters—not that Harry’s letters were of any particular consequence, either to himself or other people—or that he ought to look after a job which was in progress for him at the saddler’s or the smith’s. He actually astounded the assembled Friarton market, he did not scandalise it—nothing which Harry could do did scandalise his neighbours—by entering it in such primitive guise. He had made up his mind, to begin with, that to be a yeoman at Copley Grange Farm was the same as being a colonist, and the more he brought his establishment and personal practice to what Harry conceived to be the colonial level, the more refreshingly novel the play was, and the more he enjoyed it.
Horace did not adopt all Harry’s new customs, for the sufficient reason that Horry was a sickly fellow, unable to cope with Harry in braving fatigue and exposure to the weather. But Horace not only found no fault with his chosen champion in his antics, the brother liked the changed life, and was the better for it in body and mind, because Harry, while he was still tasting its essence, and skimming its cream, enjoyed it with the lad’s naturally huge omnivorous appetite for enjoyment, and Harry’s enjoyment was always more or less infectious where his nearest friend was concerned.
The infection spread to more than Horace when Harry came into Friarton Town, in the fancy dress which he had taken into his head to wear, whistling or singing aloud in his fine baritone, though the song was of no higher musical or intellectual calibre than ‘The Two Obadiahs,’ with sheer lightness of heart and gleefulness of spirit, the very pessimists, in the habit of finding the foundations of the world out of joint, and holding life to be stale, flat, and unprofitable, were won to smile, as well as to sigh. Harry Stanhope was such a goodly spectacle in the flush of his youth and strength and exuberant spirits, if one could but forget that there came a term to these magnificent animal gifts, and a just reckoning for the days of their triumph. After all, the recollection only lent a wistful charm to all that was fleeting in Harry’s glory.
It was not merely those who were closest to his own class—the Wrights, Fremantles, and the vicar’s family—who delighted in Harry and conspired to spoil him as the finest young fellow in the world, perfectly charming, so delightfully natural, frank and unpretending, so imperturbably good-natured in accommodating himself to the difference in his position—though, to be sure, he could not forfeit his birthright. It was not merely Fan Constable who beamed on Harry as on a gay and gallant deliverer from the social depths into which Oliver’s extraordinary recantation had consigned them afresh. At the same time, Fan alone saw meeting in Harry, in the strangest, most fascinating manner, both the confirmation and the contradiction of all her early predilections and aspirations, until, in mingled conviction and reaction, she was ready to honour gentle breeding more than ever; while she became in a way reconciled to Oliver’s flight, which appeared to coincide with Harry Stanhope’s course. She began to feel dubious whether Oliver were so entirely wrong as she had supposed, whether he were not following, without guessing it, a veritably noble and knightly impulse in his raid against modern trade dragons, and his search for the San Graal in the homeliest quarters. That dim undefined notion, whether true or false, did much to restore Fan’s equanimity and cheerfulness. What did it matter if the Wrights and Fremantles, who were so frightened for hazarding their own debatable footing, turned their backs, when Harry Stanhope lent the Constables the far greater weight of his support, and constantly directed upon them his laughing face, coming to Friarton Mill ten times oftener and on twenty times more friendly terms, than Oliver with his contradictory spirit authorised?
Yet Oliver too, in spite of himself, liked the lad for the very qualities which were the furthest removed from Oliver’s own—the boyish thoughtlessness, sanguineness and absence of any sense of responsibility, the half-kindly and wholly confiding selfishness which impressed on Harry the rooted belief that the whole world revolved, somehow, round him and Horry, and was in a manner made for their gain or loss; the half-audacious goodwill which made Harry claim, so unhesitatingly and in such a large measure, the goodwill of his fellows. Harry was as free from self-consciousness as he was mercurial, and the summer sun warmed him through and through, without his being ever troubled with a shiver of repulsion, or a groan of obligation, in the view of wrongdoing and retribution on every side. Oliver was tempted to admire as well as to despise, to covet while he condemned, Harry’s monstrous exulting egotism.
After the first shock of his sister Fan’s inconsistent secession to Harry Stanhope’s side of the question, Oliver looked on, without surprise, if a little sardonically, and witnessed Harry’s unbounded success in Friarton.
For the very Dadds and Polleys, who cherished a deadly distrust to one of themselves that had penetrated to a higher sphere and professed to return to his own, fraternised in a manner with the intruder, called him ‘the right kidney,’ a pleasant young gentleman as ever lived, taking his frolic as he was free to do. Bless you, he could not really let himself down, be he ever so willing. His people and his class would see to that. It was only his way of making fun. He was a gentleman-farmer, like the lord-lieutenant, or as the late Prince Consort had been, though he amused himself with aping the old yeomen. And he had no fad of raising up the middle-class, any more than he had of leaping over the moon. He gave himself no airs of superior wisdom and virtue. It was only that he could make himself happy anywhere, and had an agreeable word to say to everybody; while nobody was such a donkey as to mistake Mr. Stanhope’s manner or presume upon it.
Old Dadd laughed loudly at Harry’s pranks, recalling old members of the gentlefolks he had known who drove coaches and made walking tours in sorry disguises for bets. He entertained Harry himself with these reminiscences, to which the lad listened with his usual affability, old Dadd standing hat in hand the while and Harry forgetting to bid the draper cover his head in the mock yeoman’s presence.
Jack Dadd was enchanted when Harry not only enrolled himself a member of the cricket club, but presided over its entertainments in the ‘Admiral Keppel’ afterwards. Here was an adherent worth having, an authority as ready as he was great, from his unimpeachable advantages, on sport and horseflesh. It was rather in pure enthusiastic homage to his gifts and attainments, than in lurking sycophancy, that, though Harry was fain to render himself hail-fellow-well-met to his new associates, Jack began by deferring to him unfeignedly, and headed the other members in cheerfully acknowledging Harry’s born supremacy. The would be man of the people accepted the unsolicited tribute as a matter of course, and not at all as if he disliked it. On the contrary, he showed a very fair capacity for playing the cock of the roost in addition to his other performances.
And only Oliver Constable groaned over these indications of what would be the sort of alliance formed between Harry Stanhope and his adopted class; how the members of widely severed sets in society brought together through self-interest and for self-indulgence, would play into each other’s weaknesses, and simply work out their mutual lapse and loss.
Strict disciplinarian as Mrs. Polley was, she did not object to her girls giggling at Harry Stanhope’s exuberant chaff, and exultingly accepting bets of gloves and ribands with him, in which the Miss Polleys were always the winners. Mrs. Polley did not exactly understand that Harry Stanhope, who at his present stage was incapable of being anything else than boyishly friendly and merry with all women, had chaffed in precisely the same manner the barmaids of his earlier acquaintance. Mrs. Polley herself smiled broadly on Harry’s jokes, and called him ‘a good sort,’ a perfect gentleman, none of your stuck-up pretenders—unquestionably Harry was not a stuck-up pretender.
The one dissentient voice in Friarton was that of Catherine Hilliard. When her cousin Louisa took the brothers under her wing, as if Harry needed the protection, and doted on the youngest, she would have had Catherine dote on him also. Mrs. Hilliard was too good-naturedly selfish, too hilariously cynical, too well occupied on her own account, to be a regular match-maker, supposing there had been scope for anything save sick match-making in Friarton and the neighbourhood. But she would not have objected, from the first hour she spent in the company of the would-be yeoman, to making up a match between Harry Stanhope and Catherine. Mrs. Hilliard would have lost her cousin as a constant companion, but she would have found a jovial ally to her heart’s content in Harry. And if the attractive young man’s worldly wisdom was not his strong point, that was Catherine’s look-out, not Mrs. Hilliard’s. He would form the most hospitable and genial of kinsmen and neighbours, if he might not have all the qualifications for a safe husband. On the other hand, the contrast between Catherine and him was all that could be wished. It would do Catherine a world of good to have her bookishness—detestable in a woman—her untenable notions, her chillness and asperity, routed out of her by a gay-tempered, easy-minded husband, whose easy-mindedness might not preclude the wholesome discipline of any amount of obtuseness and stubbornness, when interference with his masculine prerogatives was in question.
But unfortunately, Catherine could not see the beauty of the contrast between herself and Harry Stanhope, as establishing an incontestable point of union where the two were concerned. ‘He is no better than an overgrown boy,’ she said, with a half-weary scorn. ‘He has not a thought or care beyond his pleasure.’
‘My dear, that is what is so particularly nice about the boy,’ remonstrated Louisa Hilliard. ‘You and many other people are weighed down with care, and the consciousness of care, to no purpose. What we specially want at this epoch in human history, is a robust faculty of enjoyment.’
‘I think I prefer the poor deaf fellow,’ said Catherine, in her spirit of contradiction. ‘He loses his identity in that of his brother.’
‘Is that such a boon to the world, to lose one’s self and live in one’s neighbour’s life?’ asked Mrs. Hilliard, shaking her head in merry incredulity. ‘I am not sure that it might not prove easier and more comfortable, on the whole, to be another than to be myself. I should feel so deliciously neutral, you may be sure—nothing could touch me very nearly. Your toothache would tingle quite bearably, suffered by reflection through my nerves.’
‘I don’t think it is quite so with Mr. Horace Stanhope,’ said Catherine coldly. ‘I don’t suppose you understand, Louisa.’
‘Not I, farther than that it is not in you to go with the multitude, either for good or evil. Child, I am certain it is for good, and to our credit, when the rest of us heartily admire and like a fine, manly, friendly fellow like young Stanhope, and I should have thought—though I am not super-subtle in my intuitions—that you would have valued him for standing by the poor creature his brother; whom, with what I must call a morbid taste, you set yourself to prefer to the fairy prince in his own person.’
‘What!’ exclaimed Catherine, ‘value a man for caring for the dog which is fonder of him than of anything else in the world?’
‘Well, there is a proverbial estimate of “a dog’s life,” while there are many good sorts of men that kick their dogs occasionally, when they need chastisement,’ speculated Louisa, maliciously treading on one of Catherine’s hobbies.
‘Yes; and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals exists for the punishment of men’s brutality,’ said Catherine, with her pale cheeks flushing.
‘My love, the Society has to do with ruffians—let us trust they are comparatively rare. You are speaking like a girl who has been brought up by maiden hands, who expects a man to behave like another girl such as herself, not to say like an angel. She does not take into account his different nature and rearing, together with his greater temptations; she shrieks hysterically, and calls his least faults by preposterously exaggerated names. Men who have nothing to do with her either laugh at her, or fall into ecstasies over her baby innocence. But woe betide her and her husband—should she consent to take such a necessary appendage—if she will not open her eyes, and submit to know a little more of the world. You must accept an older woman’s word for it, Catherine, that a man may kick his dog when the animal is troublesome; he may even swear a little at his wife, under great provocation, and yet neither be absolutely barbarous nor profane.’
‘There may be something in what you say with regard to the wife’—began Catherine, in perfect sincerity, but was stopped by the laughter of Mrs. Hilliard.
‘For shame, Catherine, to prefer a dog to a man—or rather to a woman. Never mind, there is another respectable old saw to draw inferences from, in this case: “Love me, love my dog.” No doubt you are paying Harry Stanhope the most delicate of compliments in your favour for Horace.’
Catherine disdained to reply to the insinuation.
But though Catherine declined to add to the number of Harry Stanhope’s worshippers, she appeared, like the other women, to be drawn into his court where he stood the centre, next to Mrs. Hilliard herself, of the bright stirring drawing-room at the Meadows. Catherine’s imagination tempted her to speculate, with however little hope, on the diversities and vagaries of human character. A new type arrested her, as an unknown specimen stops and holds fast the naturalist. Harry was strange to her in the sparkle of his bold thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness and pure and simple egotism. The qualities were all naturally repugnant to her, still they attracted her curiosity for a time, as qualities which she had never met before, and might never meet again, in the same degree or combination. Catherine, too, looked and listened as if carried away with the charm when Harry, nothing loth, figured as the hero of the hour, recounted his youthful exploits by flood and field, volunteered, without a grain of shyness or scruple as to the acceptableness of his service, to be at the beck of any and every woman present—for Harry was no languid, supercilious, fine gentleman. He was a gallant cavalier to the heart’s core. He only asked to be allowed to help every woman, while he helped himself liberally to the first place in her regard. But he was the reverse of the odious cowardly personage—we may trust he figures more largely in fiction than in real life—the lady-killer, professed or unprofessed. All was open and above board with Harry; and upon the whole his attentions were too impartial to have much individuality or to be invested with special danger. It seemed as if he consented to be heard or seen for the entire sex’s benefit, as he span his yarns—not particularly original, wise or witty, but with an indescribable charm in them, due to their fresh lightheartedness—of his school and college frolics: his prowess at ‘hare and hounds;’ how he was a bogie to his dame; his surreptitious introduction of ‘Pin Him’ into his quad; the row he had been in when town fought gown; the wrinkle he had been able to give such an awfully clever fellow as Tyler in making up for the private theatricals at the Wests—whose place was near Harry’s cousins. Then he sang his songs whenever they were wanted; songs less aggressively warlike and sportsmanlike than the songs of Jack Dadd and the other peaceful counter-jumpers—sometimes love songs, or songs expressing passionate memories, and tender yearnings, with fiery depths, and pathetic echoes which Harry Stanhope had never fathomed, but which yet thrilled the listeners as the words and airs were given by the full flexible young voice.
It looked as if Harry were carrying all before him, and winning each heart—including that of dreamy, dissatisfied Catherine Hilliard.
Oliver Constable judged so, as he lounged and contorted himself unnoticed in the background, and said it was the way of the world and that young beggar’s luck, of which he was not worthy, which he could not be expected to prize at its proper value.
Two people knew better. Catherine Hilliard could not be called one of the two, for she never took the question into consideration. It would have felt too preposterous to her to enquire beforehand, what her feelings might or might not become, for any hero of flesh and blood. Besides, Harry Stanhope was not a man to her, only a boy, a big, merry boy, who formed a momentary study for the thoughtful woman.
Mrs. Hilliard, while she was perfectly conscious of the latent antagonism between Catherine and Harry Stanhope, still threw them somewhat ostentatiously together, making Catherine play the accompaniments to his songs, and causing him—which was a little of a trial to Harry’s good temper, to be always on the side of Catherine—an incorrigible bungler, almost as bad as Oliver himself—in the lawn games in which Harry Stanhope and Fan Constable were adepts, a pleasure for game lovers to look upon. Mrs. Hilliard elected Harry to take down Catherine to the improvised suppers which were apt to follow the improvised parties at the Meadows. Mrs. Hilliard could manage these manœuvres with so much ease that it robbed them of half their attractiveness to the manœuvrer, she was wont to complain privately, since Catherine was as blind as a baby to any premeditation in such arrangements, and was only more or less bored by the consequences. All the same, it was her, Louisa Hilliard’s, duty to do what she could as a hostess in the judicious assortment of her guests, and to show her cousinly regard by doing what she could also to prevent Catherine’s missing, by anything save her own folly, the chance of what would never be a great and yet might prove a suitable establishment, in days when girls, far more attractive to the generality of men than Catherine was, could not pick and choose in making a match.
If the hostess baffled and plagued any rival pretender—say Fan Constable—to a lion’s share of Harry Stanhope’s universal attentions, so much the better for Mrs. Hilliard’s entertainment, and if it were so much the worse for the rival pretender, whose fault was it save her own?
Harry Stanhope was not so egregiously foolish in his vanity as to fail to penetrate the fashion in which Catherine Hilliard was taking stock of him, weighing him in the balance, and finding him hugely wanting. ‘Look here, Horry,’ he protested, thrusting his fingers through his fair hair in comical discomfiture, after an hour’s compulsory companionship with Catherine, ‘that girl has been looking at me through a microscope, and picking holes in my credit all the evening; she knows not only how I was ploughed in my smalls, but all about that time I was rusticated for the beastly row at Walsh’s, though I never told her a word of the mess. I say, I wish the old woman’ (an irreverent reference to Mrs. Hilliard, to which the lady would not have objected in the least) ‘would not persist in pairing us off together. It is no go; though no doubt Miss Hilliard’s tin might be of use in the farm, she would not have a gift of me, and unfortunately I could not get the tin without offering my precious self in exchange.’
‘Ain’t she more the style we’ve been accustomed to—I mean among our people—than Miss Constable, for instance?’ enquired Horry, doubtfully, of his oracle. ‘I think Miss Hilliard is rather a fine girl; looks like a lady without making a fuss about it.’
‘True, oh king! She is stately in her stiffness as a stage duchess. And she is a sap as well as a swell. I bet you she reads as hard as old Herculaneum, not that she ever alluded to a book to me, except to one of Lever’s stories, which she just mentioned tentatively, with great scrutinising eyes fixed upon me, the better to assure herself that it was something in my line. But I have glimpses of the old beggars the English poets, and so forth, if not of the Greek and Latin humbugs, in the turn of her neck and the wave of her hair; I am in constant horror lest she should so far forget herself as put me through my exams again—which line in “Paradise Lost” I prefer, or whether I agree with Bacon that gunpowder ought to have been invented before lucifers. I don’t think I can stand it much longer if Mrs. Hilliard will go on acting as if we were made for each other, though I am prepared to own that Miss Hilliard is innocent of any pretence in the matter. How could it be otherwise when she is so stunningly wise and learned, and the rest of it? Oh! I say, when you see all that, and the knowledge don’t crush you, suppose you go in for the lady and the tin, to be ploughed and harrowed into the dirty acres of Copley Grange Farm, and so relieve your brother-officer of the obligation, Horatio?’
Horry laughed the discordant laugh of the deaf, and mumbled a disclaimer of the honour and the implied preference on the part of Catherine, while Harry went on speaking out his thoughts to his second self with yet greater zest. ‘Now, Miss Constable believes in me—fact, I assure you. That plucky, go-ahead little woman is, not to say swindled, by me, for to do myself the justice, I never sought to take her in; but she gives me credit liberally for a thousand manly virtues I don’t possess. She half tempts me to believe in them myself,’ protested Harry, with an excited laugh. ‘It is not like you, old fellow, who have rowed in the same boat with me ever since we two came into this blessed world, and have naturally grown rather blind to my weaknesses and besotted about me altogether. She who never saw me till this season, with all her cleverness, and she is uncommonly clever, which is better by a long chalk than being bookish—not that she is not an educated woman also—does more than take me on trust. She endows me with all the energy and endurance which are hers, not mine. She speaks as if I were going, single-handed, to bring in the waste places of the earth, and found a family. Confound it, Horry, it’s rather nice, and generally improving to be believed in like that by a handsome, good woman, as true as steel, I’ll wager my head, and as proud as Lucifer in her own way, while she is ’cute enough in anything else to see through a millstone,’ finished Harry, complacently stroking his beard, as if he were beginning to suspect that he was really a finer fellow than he himself, or any other person, save the faithful follower by his side, had given him credit for.
CHAPTER XIII.
OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS CLASS.
Oliver nourished the forlorn hope that he might do something with the girls of his rank in raising their aspirations and refining their habits. They at least belonged to the gentler sex, and ought to be by constitution more tractable and altogether of finer clay. He took to dropping in of an evening at the Polleys, where the male element in the back parlour was but feebly represented by superseded Mr. Polley.
Oliver turned with disdain from Fan’s despairing warning: ‘Oliver, if you don’t take care, Mrs. Polley will think you are proposing to “keep company” with one of her girls, and if you don’t fulfil her expectations, she will set you down unhesitatingly and proclaim you openly to be “a flirty, shillyshallying fellow, who don’t know your own mind.” Are you such a greenhorn that you require to be told you cannot look twice at a girl of this stamp, or exchange three sentences with her, without the girl, or her parents for her, concluding that you mean something in the matrimonial line, and going on to class you as her admirer and suitor, and to calculate what sort of match you will make for her? As you are, undoubtedly, a great match in the Polleys’ eyes, you ought to behave with common prudence.’
‘No, no!’ denied Oliver vehemently, blushing hotly with chivalrous pain. ‘You are aspersing your whole sex, Fan, in the persons of tradesmen’s daughters; and if there were any ground for the aspersion, it would be high time that it should be done away with, by the introduction of wider, simpler, more friendly intercourse between young men and women.’
‘Perhaps you really mean to ally yourself with the family,’ said Fan in her vexation, falling into the offence which was unusual with her, of employing almost as tall language as ’Liza Polley might have adopted on a similar occasion. ‘To be perfectly consistent, you ought. All I ask is that you will tell me in time.’
‘That you may carry off your goods and chattels before they are contaminated by coming in contact with Miss ’Liza’s or Miss ’Mily’s bridal finery, and renounce me as a brother before you are forced to own her as a sister,’ said Oliver, beginning to laugh. ‘All right. But I don’t own to the soft impeachment yet, though, if ever my time should come, why not a Miss Polley—I beg her pardon for the liberty taken with her name, but I did not begin the impertinence—why not a Miss Polley, I say, as well as another?’
Oliver spoke with light defiance but with some bitterness underlying his challenge, for his thoughts had gone back to an encounter that morning, when Catherine Hilliard, driving with her cousin, had passed him and his baker’s shop, literally with unseeing eyes. She had looked more delicate and tired out than ever. No wonder, when she was being not merely morally starved, but slowly poisoned in her Palace of Art, her fantastic ideal world.
Oliver was too manly, with a higher manliness than Jack Dadd’s or than that of many persons of far greater pretensions than Jack, to experience the particular dread of misconception which Fan had sought to instil into her brother. He was shy enough in his way, and he fought tough battles with his shyness every day he lived, but his self-consciousness did not take this form. He had revolted at it every time he met it, not only when young Dadd boasted of girls making dead sets at him, and showing themselves, poor little souls, spoony on his account, but when fellows, who might have known better, expressed their alarm for the lasting consequences of the temporary associations of Commemoration Week, or talked of running the gauntlet of the dowagers and damsels of the London season. Oliver had felt still more aggrieved when he found the same gratuitous insinuations in books of ‘unexceptionable tone,’ where men—bachelors and widowers, of mature years and sane minds, masters of the situation in every other respect—were represented as timidly putting themselves under the wings of female relations that the heads of the houses might be protected from the wary advances or bold attacks of the single women in their neighbourhood who cherished designs on their freedom. Well, no doubt, there were women of all kinds, like men; but was it honest women, modest women, women with souls, women like the men’s mothers, sisters, future and past wives, whom brother-men thus insulted, while sister-women handed on the insult?
Oliver’s company certainly induced the Polley girls to forego, for the evenings on which he called, their wanderings abroad in search of gossip and amusement, which their mother tolerated because young folks must have their day, and the girls had their markets (matrimonial) to make, being bound, in a measure, to keep on the outlook for settlements in life.
But the young Polleys’ gaddings were restrained within certain well-defined and not to be subverted bounds of time and circumstance. The Miss Polleys, collectively or singly, might frequent their neighbours’ houses or such promenades as Friarton afforded, till three quarters past nine, but they must be safe at home, if not at supper, at the latest by ten o’clock, when the house-door was formally locked by Mrs. Polley in person. No Miss Polley was at liberty to stray into companionship not approved of by her mother, not even ’Mily—‘the most owdacious of the set,’ as Mrs. Polley was sometimes moved to term her favourite daughter, in referring to ’Mily’s flights of wild spirits and self-will—dared to transgress in these respects.
Oliver took it as no particular compliment to him that the Miss Polleys should be induced to stay at home when he was a visitor. Common hospitality—of which their class was by no means deficient, required it of all or some of them. And it seemed to the young man that any variety must be welcome in the atmosphere—the intellectual stagnation of which was equal to its literal oppressiveness—laden as it was with the odours, from the shop, of cheese, sugar, and coffee.
Mrs. Polley—the presiding genius—when she was to be seen in private life, for she was sometimes detained at the close of a busy day in the shop, suffered from the fatigue consequent on the day’s labours, and although she was always equal to an exertion, and roused herself to brandish and snap her fingers figuratively and in a friendly—well-nigh a playful fashion in Oliver’s face, he felt convinced when he or any other stranger was not there, must give herself up to cross-tiredness, to nagging her daughters, and snubbing her husband between fits of the gapes over her knitting, or coarse hemming, and rough and ready darning of household linen.
Mr. Polley, who was not regarded as company worth counting, by his own children any more than by the rest of the world, did no more than contribute the dreariest platitudes and the stalest incidents from his second day’s newspaper, to the feast of reason and the flow of soul. There grew to be a merit in the girls’ persistent giggles and in the light-hearted empty chatter and idle gossip, pointed by personalities and spiced by scandal, with which they stirred the heaviness, and the absence of all dignity and beauty, from which Oliver was not astonished that they made their escape, when they had the opportunity.