Italic represented by underscores surrounding the italic text. Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.

OLIVER CONSTABLE

MILLER AND BAKER

BY

SARAH TYTLER

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

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III.

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

[All rights reserved]

CONTENTS

OF

THE THIRD VOLUME.

CHAPTER PAGE

XXIII. HARRY STANHOPE’S WANT 1

XXIV. FAN’S TRIUMPH 22

XXV. ‘THE DEVIL SHALL NOT HAVE HARRY’ 59

XXVI. THE PRICE AT WHICH HARRY STANHOPE WAS RESCUED 96

XXVII. THE LAST PENNY PAID 126

XXVIII. OLIVER’S RETURN 140

XXIX. FRESH SERVICE 175

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

XXXI. LIFE—AND DEATH 214

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

OLIVER CONSTABLE,

MILLER AND BAKER.

CHAPTER XXIII.

HARRY STANHOPE’S WANT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXIV.

FAN’S TRIUMPH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXV.

‘THE DEVIL SHALL NOT HAVE HARRY.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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