OLIVER CONSTABLE
VOL. II.

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.

[Pg 2]

‘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 [Pg 3]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.’

[Pg 4]

‘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 [Pg 5]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 [Pg 6]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 [Pg 7]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 [Pg 8]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 [Pg 9]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 [Pg 10]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 [Pg 11]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 [Pg 12] 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 [Pg 13]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. [Pg 14]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.

[Pg 15]

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 [Pg 16]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 [Pg 17]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. [Pg 18]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 [Pg 19]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 [Pg 20]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 [Pg 21]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 [Pg 22]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 [Pg 23]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 [Pg 24]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 [Pg 25]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 [Pg 26]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.’

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, [Pg 28]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 [Pg 29]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 [Pg 30]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 [Pg 31]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 [Pg 32]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 [Pg 33]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 [Pg 34]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 [Pg 35]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 [Pg 36]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 [Pg 37]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 [Pg 38]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 [Pg 39]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 [Pg 40]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 [Pg 41]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, [Pg 42]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 [Pg 43]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 [Pg 44]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 [Pg 45]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 [Pg 46]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 [Pg 47]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 [Pg 48]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.

[Pg 49]

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. [Pg 50]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 [Pg 51]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 [Pg 52]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 [Pg 53]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 [Pg 54]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 [Pg 55]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.

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 [Pg 57]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, [Pg 58]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 [Pg 59]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 [Pg 60]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 [Pg 61]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 [Pg 62]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 [Pg 63]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 [Pg 64]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.

The Polleys had another sitting-room besides that behind the shop, a best parlour or drawing-room as the girls liked to call it, in which they sometimes sat with their hands crossed in their laps, or engaged in fancy-work, entertaining company. But as Oliver chose to come to them in the character of a family friend, a distinction which they appreciated, Mrs. Polley overruled her daughters’ objections and elected that he should be received in the ordinary family room.

‘He shall see us as we are,’ said the matron when the Polleys were all together in the back parlour one evening before supper. ‘He sha’n’t have to say we were honey to his face and molasses behind his back. Besides, we don’t do [Pg 65]nothing we are ashamed of. I tell you what, gals, if he has got any one of you in his eye already, he’s that kind of chap, if I’m not mistaken, he’ll think a deal more of you, and be more likely to grow sweet on you, if he finds you with me and father, in your house-gowns, working at your needles in the parlour here, than if he were supposed to catch you sitting like dressed-up dolls, at your fine-lady nonsense of crochet and bead-work, in the other room, as, I dare say—for I have not been out at the mill-house for years now—I’m a stay-at-home, even if Fan Constable were readier with her invitations—his sister sits from morning till night.’

‘It’s all you know, mother,’ said ’Mily, a well-grown buxom girl of eighteen; ‘but at least it shows you have not made yourself cheap at Friarton Mill. Fan sees callers in her bare cold hole of a drawing-room certainly; but when I go there, which is precious seldom as I know [Pg 66]she would rather have my room than my company, she is always pretending to be notable over a heap of such common hemming and back-stitching as even you can do. Fancy! she was making bed curtains, and not keeping them out of the way either, the last time I was there. She is as busy as any sewing girl over the vicarage old women’s flannel petticoats and children’s cotton frocks. Rather she than I slave for such cattle. We give a good subscription to Mr. Holland’s poor-box, and that’s enough, I should think. But Fan curries favour with the vicarage people, who have taken her up, though Peter Constable was an old chapel-goer like we are, and Oliver goes to chapel still. I am at a loss to tell what gentility she has more than us, except that she’s that proud and stuck-up,’ and ’Mily sat up in her chair with Fan’s most frigid air, amidst the loud applause of her sisters.

‘Now mind what you’re about, ’Mily,’ her mother reproved the actress; ‘you may not be [Pg 67]far wrong, and you’re smart at taking people off—there’s no denying it, but you may do it once too often. What would Oliver Constable think if he saw you? He may not have any nonsense about him, but he won’t care to have his sister turned into a laughing-stock.’

‘I’m sure I don’t mind a fiddle-stick what he cares,’ protested ’Mily, taking high ground.

‘Hold your tongue, and don’t speak again to me, Miss,’ insisted Mrs. Polley. ‘You get too much of your head as it is; but you sha’n’t spoil your chances by your folly before my very eyes.’

‘It ain’t likely to be me, mother,’ cried ’Mily, rather enjoying the implication. ‘It will be ’Liza if it’s to be any of us. She is fitter to tackle him with her rubbish of poetry, which ought to suit a college man.’

‘Me!’ ejaculated ’Liza, a delicate, rather indolent girl, in injured innocence. ‘I never spoke about poetry to Oliver Constable.’

[Pg 68]

‘And I should just like to hear you try it,’ Mrs. Polley gave her literary daughter fair warning; ‘though a song is all very well at a proper time and place, at a party or after supper. I was a good singer myself in my day—you need not make faces, ’Mily—and I can raise the tune yet in chapel a deal truer than a pack of set-up madams with money wasted on them in an instrument and in piany-forty lessons.’ The last cut bore reference to the superannuated piano in the Polleys’ drawing-room, and the two quarters’ fees for instruction in playing on it, vouchsafed by Mrs. Polley to her daughters, being what they might claim as their due in education according to the growing requirements of their station. ‘But to sing my Maker’s praises is one thing,’ went on Mrs. Polley severely, ‘or even to be able to manage a song or two in addition to a hymn, and to have any traffic with play or poetry books is another. To my mind, they’re worse than novels and romances, and [Pg 69]you all know what your deacons think of them. You gals may read them on the sly sometimes, but it had need to be on the sly, for if I get my hands on such devil’s books, into the fire or out of the window they go. Them’s my opinions, and if you think to defy them you know the consequences.’

‘Compose yourself, my dear,’ ventured Mr. Polley, looking up from his newspaper. ‘I apprehend you’re going just a little too far. I remember the old minister gave in to recommend Uncle Tom’s——’

‘Uncle Tom’s cat!’ interrupted Mrs. Polley, disrespectfully. ‘A good turn of honest work is a far better employment than snivelling over any made up story—though it were Mr. Holland or the old minister himself as made it up. You can tell him I said so, if you like. I wonder anybody can be so silly—not to say so unprincipled, for I call it downright want of principle, to be taken in by printed lies. [Pg 70]Reading trash of stories and verses never paid a debt, or filled a hungry stomach, that I ever heard tell of. But I’ll tell you what they’ve done,’ speaking triumphantly in vindication of her theory, ‘they’ve brought an idiot like Poet Dymott,’ alluding to a local poet of humble vocation, ‘as low as the union. Luckily his silly of a wife who encouraged him died early, and they had no children to suffer from his not sticking to his last and shoe-leather. Fools’ tales sent a light-headed gipsy like Mrs. Dadd’s last servant into the county asylum, after she was pulled out of Buller’s Brook, where she might have stopped still for all the washing her character had got. We should be a deal better off for maids-of-all-work, when we’ve the misfortune to need ’em, if it were not for the trumpery “Family Heralds” and “People’s Journals” as the girls have the impudence to take out, throwing away their pence, and sitting up at nights by the help of prigged [Pg 71]candle-hends, at the risk of setting houses on fire, and creeping and dawdling about their work next day. I don’t hold against a book as is an improving book, and deals with our latter hends,’ Mrs. Polley granted, showing herself a little more liberal and capable of making a concession, ‘at a proper time, on a Sunday evening, when it rains cats and dogs, so as to make chapel out of the question, and there’s nothing else to do at home. But I’d like to see any of you gals settle to a volume of sermons, if there was a glistening chimneypot hat or a draggled tail of a skirt to watch passing the door. I don’t make any stand against Polley muddling for ever amongst his newspapers, since he’s no good at any better job.’

‘Missus Polley!’ objected the gentleman, looking up again from his newspaper, with his hat still on his head. Though he rarely stirred beyond the parlour, he wore his hat, except when he was at meals or in bed, as [Pg 72]if to give him the help of a few inches added to his masculine height. He spoke half under his breath in subdued displeasure.

‘I don’t deny I like myself to know what’s a-going on, when I’ve time to listen, which ain’t often, and Polley’s reading out saves me the trouble of looking over the news,’ confessed the matron candidly, taking not the smallest notice of her husband’s appeal unless by speaking, if anything, in a louder key. ‘Besides, it helps to keep him out of harm’s way.’

‘Missus Polley!’ groaned the defaulter more clamorously.

‘What are you Missus Polleying me for?’ his helpmeet turned on him briskly. ‘You ain’t going to deny the tricks you played me when first we went together, Polley? It is as well to keep you out of temptation, though I should just like to see you trying on that trade again, now that I’ve got the upper hand, and you’ve got some notion of the value of a good wife, as has kept a roof [Pg 73]over your and the gals’ heads, and a full table, and the shop flourishing more than it ever did in your day. You ought to bless your stars, Polley, that you ever set eyes on my face, or that I consented to have a bad bargain in you.’

’Mily Polley was a little tired of hearing the chronicle of her father’s delinquencies and her mother’s virtues; she broke in upon the monologue, reminding her mother of an instance of inconsistency in her conduct. ‘I wonder, mother, you ever let poetry books lie in the house or suffer ’Liza to look into them.’

‘You know as well as I do, ’Mily,’ Mrs. Polley explained, shortly, ‘that ’Liza has not been so strong as the rest of you gals, and when she has not been able to sit up with her colds and influenzas, there was no great wrong done in her diverting herself with a book, though I could have wished it had been of a more sensible and serious kind. I did try to set Mr. Holland upon her about that.’

[Pg 74]

‘I was dumpish enough, I can tell you, without reading mouldy sermons,’ grumbled ’Liza. ‘I wonder how any of you would have liked to be condemned either to do that or count your fingers, for my strength was that gone I was not able so much as to hold a crochet-hook, and Mr. Holland said there was no harm in my pieces, some of them were most elegant.’

‘Then ’Liza’s books,’ said Ann Polley, who was commonplace and practical to excess, ‘are not ’Liza’s any more than ours, only that she looks into them sometimes. They are school prizes and Christmas gifts, and keepsakes from friends, though I think they might hit on better presents. It would be a great pity if you were so far left to yourself as to burn them, mother, since some of them are quite handsome “table books,” which I should be sorry to handle except to dust, for fear of spoiling their red [Pg 75]and green and gold backs. They are a great ornament laid round the drawing-room table.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Polley, decidedly, ‘that is the right place for them. They will turn nobody’s feather head, and waste nobody’s time save in the dusting, lying there.’

After all, if Oliver had always been ushered into the drawing-room which these closed books were supposed to embellish, he would not have found many traces of higher aspirations in its gaudy carpet, and chairs and tables of one ponderous monotonous style, since Mrs. Polley’s influence had at least saved them from being slim and gimcrack, with its samples of meretricious fancy-work, in which there was as little fancy as there was use, than he could discover in the back parlour. The family room was furnished with the darkest drugget and coarsest mahogany and hair cloth. It did not, according to the [Pg 77]Polleys’ ideas, admit of any attempt at ornament. It was reserved to fulfil their notions of ease and comfort, the table being often covered and littered with the materials employed in the girls’ home dressmaking, and the chimney-piece given over to Mr. Polley’s tobacco-pouch and pipes, and Mrs. Polley’s thimble and reels of cotton.

’Mily Polley was not a bad mimic in that lowest development of art which is contented to grasp and caricature such salient details and absurdities of human nature as come within the artist’s limited observation. And though there was a horrible absence of reverence and tenderness in the girl’s rendering of some old woman’s palsied utterance, or some half-imbecile boy’s stutter, in her cool giving of her own father’s stock phrases, even in her close copies of Mr. Holland—the Polleys’ clergyman’s—stiff or strained gestures in the most solemn part of his services, the representation was the only [Pg 78]version of the drama which ever reached the Polleys, while it was as good as a play in forcing Mrs. Polley to relax into a grim smile and to forget for a moment her rare achievements, and in stimulating Mr. Polley to clap his hands magnanimously at the mocking echo of himself.

There was no theatre in Friarton, and if there had been, the Polleys belonged to a branch of the Christian Church which condemns theatres without reservation, nay, sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Polley, extends the condemnation to play-books as well as players.

Yet it struck Oliver Constable that the Polleys were at the level of civilisation when the theatre, if not abused and tabooed, would have naturally come in as an effective instrument in their training. He arrived at the conclusion as he formed one of the audience to the mimicry which ’Mily Polley, who was proud of her gift, was sometimes tempted to practise before her friends and acquaintances, [Pg 79]in addition to her family; as he took notice of the nicknames which abounded in her vocabulary in about an equal degree to that in which they flourished in Jack Dadd’s speech; and as Oliver observed the glee with which the girl utilised any exceptionally silly or stupid person who had the misfortune to enter her circle, making him or her serve for a temporary butt. The last was grievously disloyal, and the worst thing was that nobody—neither the mistress nor the master of the house, not even ’Liza, who was certainly gentler than the others, who sometimes read a little from choice, and who was therefore under the impression that she had culture—recognised the disloyalty.

But the mimicry was an intellectual effort a shade in advance of the bald individual experiences, the tittle-tattle purely peddling, or more or less mischievous, which constituted the staple of the Polleys’ conversation, and was just such an effort as the theatre might have [Pg 80]spurred on and supplemented. Oliver imagined the Polleys might have liked to go to a respectable theatre which was not under an ecclesiastical ban, might have enjoyed a broad farce, and relished and profited so far by one of the homelier order of tragedies.

What he could not imagine was, that till they had gone a little farther in elementary knowledge, and without the theatre, which comes in to meet the intellectual law that perception and imitation are among the first acts of the mental powers of a child, or an undeveloped man or woman, any of the Polleys, with the exception of ’Liza, could derive the smallest benefit or satisfaction from the mass of books, which, to be sure, they left untouched. He ceased also to be surprised that the Polley family should be in the section of Mr. Holland’s congregation, the members of which composed themselves, after the prayers and hymns, to look round on their neighbours and [Pg 81]manifestly take stock of their presence, looks and clothes, or who openly nodded and audibly snored throughout their clergyman’s finest peroration, with which, however, they would not have consented to dispense, since they took a reflected pride in his fervid eloquence as contrasted with the vicar’s well-bred conversation in the pulpit. Oliver had ceased to get impatient with what he had been accustomed to consider Holland’s violent transitions in a variety of bad styles—from the strongly sensational to the familiarly anecdotal—bordering on the facetious, when the critic was better able to estimate the order of intelligence with which, to a large extent, the preacher had to deal. Oliver began to pity the poor teacher, who was bound alike by his calling and his conscience to impart the highest truths which could be addressed to humanity, to these dense minds and stolid hearts.

Oliver found the girls by fits and starts [Pg 82]furiously busy, or, in spite of their mother, absolutely idle. It was clear that notwithstanding, or because of, their mental vacuity, they luxuriated in idleness a little after the fashion of the dwellers in Eastern zenanas. The Polleys still regarded idleness much as their poor young drudge of a maid-of-all-work, taken from the workhouse school, looked upon it, with more reason, as one of the great gains of having risen and prospered in business and the world. To do nothing save gabble idle gossip was next best to wearing fine clothes every day of the week and every hour of the day, and eating at every meal early lamb and salmon, pastry, plum-cake, and strawberry ices, which the Polleys’ class are now in circumstances to add to their more primitive dainties of pork-pies, muffins, and shrimps. Idleness was one of the established privileges of ladies to which the girls gave full credit, and of which they were not slow to avail themselves when [Pg 83]they had the opportunity. It might pall in time, and so might the fine clothes and fine food in unlimited quantities, but such satiety the Polley girls were not likely to attain so long as they lived under their mother’s rule. And they prized their advantages the more because they were still reduced to snatch at and make the most of them when these only came in their way occasionally, by the arbitrary will of Mrs. Polley.

Oliver observed that the girls had none of the sustained industry of Fan, and that they were constantly seeking to shirk the share of work in the shop and house which their mother laid upon them. ’Mily was particularly adroit in slipping off her burdens, and her active mother made more allowance for ’Mily’s adroitness than for ’Liza’s laziness or Ann’s slowness, showing that she considered rebellion incidental to youth, and admired in this case the cleverness with which it was carried out. Mrs. [Pg 84]Polley said her youngest was ‘a sad pickle,’ but she admitted she had been thoughtless and fond of her pleasure beyond everything in her own girlhood. She daresayed a house and family on ’Mily’s refractory shoulders would steady her in time. She would rather have a girl smart for her own ends than a silly or a dawdle, any day; so far from regarding the smartness thus exercised as dishonourable to the culprit, Mrs. Polley saw in it a proof that ’Mily would be worth something in the end.

The household needlework, which is still done at home in houses like the Polleys’, was another task which the girls evaded, or discharged, with a grudge, in the most slovenly fashion. Such disgraceful needlework, to be worn in private, as the Polleys passed through their clumsy, careless fingers, Fan Constable would not have accepted from the least scholar in the vicar’s wife’s school.

It puzzled Oliver that Mrs. Polley, who [Pg 85]insisted so strongly on the merits of energy and enterprise in her own case, could, as a matter of principle, permit the comparatively useless, frivolous lives her daughters led. But when he sounded her one day on whether she did not approve of training girls to self-help, as fit successors to their fathers and mothers in such a shop as she herself conducted successfully, he found, strange as it seemed to him, that she too, was tinged with the girls’ views of gentility. Oliver, who had thought to have pleased his father’s old friend by the suggestion, had never gone so near to sending her off in a huff—and Mrs. Polley in a huff was a formidable person to have to do with.

‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with a dry cough, ‘my gals don’t ought to look forward to going into the shop. I haven’t toiled my shoulders and my ’ead, and stood there till I was fit to drop on market-days, for my gals to have to follow in [Pg 86]my shoes. If business goes with us as it has done, I’m ’appy to say, ever since I took it in hand, I expect I shall put enough by to enable the gals, if they ain’t provided with husbands in the meantime, to live on their means, and do nothing, like the best in the place.’

Oliver was silenced.

The one employment which entirely overcame the Polleys’ taste for idleness, and on which they entered with a will and the utmost zest, was what Oliver reckoned their unfortunate blunder in making objects of themselves in the line of dress. They could always be eagerly interested in frilling themselves from top to toe, in pulling down their old flounces, and furbelows, and bunches of skirts, and reconstructing them, if possible, in an uglier shape than before. They were never wearied of manufacturing the most grotesque apologies for hats and bonnets. Oliver thought, in contrast, of Fan and Catherine Hilliard’s simple [Pg 87]gowns and quiet hats, which, if he had known it, ’Mily Polley classed as the dowdiest things out, and farther stated that it was her deliberate opinion, only a learned young lady with her head in the clouds, like Miss Hilliard, or a girl with the cool assurance of Fan Constable, would take it upon her to be so plain in her dress, and would not at least try to be wearing what was stylish.

Oliver, poor benighted man, only marvelled, on the contrary, how even girls in their vagaries could accomplish such tremendous mistakes in what one might have imagined would have been the congenial art of adorning their own bodies.

Nobody could call the Polleys’ lives gloomy or austere, yet to Oliver their enjoyments appeared grievously ignoble, even when they were not of an animal character. He was very sorry for those girls, whom no man had hired to worthy work and wages. He thought of [Pg 88]the innumerable missions to the poor, and of the ladies who, to their unending credit, devoted much time and attention to raising the women of the lower ranks. He recalled the superior advantages which may be held at least to balance the increased temptations of the upper classes. And he reflected, with deep regret and shame, how Fan withdrew, and Catherine Hilliard recoiled, from all association with girls like the Polleys. What chance had they of escaping from irredeemable materialism and innate vulgarity—those deadly foes to all that is spiritual and really noble? What help was extended to them beyond the Sunday sermon which flew over their heads, and the verses in the Bible—which they read as a lesson, that had little or nothing to do with their past or present, but belonged, as Mrs. Polley would have said, to their ‘latter hends’—to rise above gross self-indulgence—so long as it was not what the world called vicious? For the Polleys were [Pg 89]not merely respectable, but even inclined to be Pharisees in their loud boasting of their respectability. Yet self-indulgence, which was not absolutely vicious, was in their eyes perfectly admissible and actually laudable. A man or a woman who would not gratify himself or herself by well-nigh wallowing in the outward fruits of success, was either a screw or a minx. Heroes and saints had very little that was heroic and saintly in them to the Polleys’ mind. All were dragged down to the same low level.

The Polleys’ standard was very little above that of the most rudimentary Christians, whether in high places, in courts and alleys, or in the bush and the jungle. The Polleys would do no murder, would not pick or steal—unless in those adaptations and adulterations of groceries, which had become part of a wide-spread system, with which all trades complied, and which nobody, save a fanatic, dreamt of [Pg 90]defining as stealing, would prove chaste maids and matrons, would not literally fall down and worship golden images, and for anything farther would regularly attend chapel—of which the heads of the house were members, and would contribute liberally and with great esprit de corps to the minister’s salary.

It did not strike Oliver that the Polleys were much exposed to the temptation to break those commandments which they respected, and for the rest, with regard to the grand spiritual lives beyond, these were simply ignored and uncomprehended. Oliver feared there was a more impassable miserable chasm between the Polleys’ mode of existence and all that belongs to a higher life, than even the ghastly gulf which cuts off the outcast in his crimes and wretchedness from purity and peace, just as it was said of old that the publicans and harlots were nearer the kingdom of heaven than their extremely respectable, outwardly moral, nay, [Pg 91]ostentatiously religious brethren. To do the Polleys justice, they made no great barren profession of religion; they contented themselves with being by inheritance and social politics chapel people, and despising the members of a state and priest-ridden church.

Oliver, in his arguments with Fan, had given all honour to the essential virtues of his class; now it pained him intensely to be forced to recognise wherein it fell short, even in precedent and tradition, not to say in word and deed, of the standards and practices of the more highly cultured and better educated classes.

Certainly truth was not confined to any rank, and flagrant deception was confessedly committed by ladies and gentlemen. But these ladies and gentlemen were not respectable members of their class and, unless in outrageous instances, counted falsehood brought home to them worldly dishonour, and concealed [Pg 92]their lapses from truth with all their might.

But a certain amount of lying did not involve the same disgrace when it came to light in Oliver’s class. Jack Dadd was singularly obtuse in perceiving that the twists and turns which he gave to his words and actions, in order to serve himself, and of which he actually boasted to Oliver, in the sense of what some Americans would call ‘smart practice’ or as capital jokes, were neither more nor less than cunningly veiled lies. As for the Polley girls, they indulged with the utmost freedom in wild exaggerations, horribly prejudiced statements, and barefaced fibbing when it suited their purpose, until Oliver hung his head and almost groaned aloud.

Of course, as Oliver was thankful to think, there were many much better representatives of the small shopkeeping class than any he encountered in Friarton—young men whose public [Pg 93]spirit and intelligence, if not their culture, far exceeded his own; girls as dutiful as Fan had been to her father, and with a still higher and truer idea of what made perfect womanliness, and of a necessity perfect ladyhood, in any rank. But he feared these formed the exceptions, more or less rare, to the ordinary rule. They were the salt of the earth, no doubt, but bore no greater proportion to the social body they preserved from corruption, than salt to the physical world with which it is incorporated. Oliver was compelled to suspect that the Dadds and Polleys presented an average specimen of their class.

Oliver sought to prove a friend and brother to the young Polleys and their girl companions as well as to Jack Dadd and his associates. In order to be so he struggled to show himself patient and judicious with the girls. He answered all their questions about his former college experience and present volunteer movement, [Pg 94]as fully as he knew how. And then he tried to carry the inquisitors to something in earth or heaven beyond their small personalities and their life in Friarton, with so poor a result that he fell back in despair to asking ’Liza Polley about the poetry—of which she was said to be fond. She did not impress him as the most intelligent of the sisters, but he fancied if she had the shadow of a taste for poetry, he had a hold upon her.

Oliver was in blissful ignorance of Mrs. Polley’s objection to such a subject of conversation, as not merely trifling in the extreme, but verging on impropriety.

For that matter, Mrs. Polley was not quite so good as her word where a well-to-do young fellow, who might be looking after one or other of her daughters, was concerned. She gave Oliver considerable license in his attempts to entertain the girls, leaving him to ‘get thick’ [Pg 95]with them in his own way, refraining, to a remarkable extent and with some disinterestedness, from her usual custom of engrossing the conversation. She only dropped one little hint which, notwithstanding Fan’s warning, Oliver failed to appropriate. ‘If you encourage ’Liza in her liking for such nonsense, you must be prepared to take the responsibility upon yourself, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with something like a simper which might have been alarming in so downright, plain-spoken a woman, had it been addressed to a less single-hearted, self-forgetful man.

But Oliver undertook the responsibility with a frankness and fearlessness which were their own defence. He assured Mrs. Polley that Miss ’Liza need take no harm from the perusal of good poetry, and pledged himself that, so far from causing her to neglect any duty, it ought rather to spur her on and brace her to its better performance. He smiled to himself after [Pg 96]the utterance of so great a platitude, while the hint evaporated in empty air.

It was poor Miss ’Liza who felt embarrassed. She had been accustomed to hear herself accused of literary tastes with an admixture of very mild vanity and rather more energetic deprecation. She was by no means sure that the tastes were sufficiently pronounced to stand the investigation of a university man. She fidgeted and hesitated, and caused ’Mily to mock her more than ever, when Oliver broached the word poetry to her. In addition, by common consent, in the light of compatibility of taste, ’Liza found Oliver Constable likely to be set aside by her family and friends as her ‘beau.’ He was in all probability coming after one of the sisters in his regular visits to the back parlour, and ’Liza was the one who struck her own set, at the first glance, as cut out for him.

’Liza was quite the girl to believe what everybody told her. And she was not without [Pg 97]a sense of obligation to the world in general and to her sisters in particular, for handing over Oliver to her. She was struck by the disinterestedness of Ann and ’Mily, and she was flattered with the notion of a distinguished conquest on her own part.

On the other hand, ’Liza Polley was not so simple as to suppose that her sisters were actuated entirely by generosity in their early withdrawal from any rivalry in her pretensions to Oliver Constable. Indeed, in spite of her literary bent, ’Liza was ready to agree with ’Mily in her sweeping assertion that Oliver was ‘a handsome gorilla of a duffer,’ who was always talking sense, or nonsense which was no better than sense, since it was past their comprehension, and who was constantly on the verge of lecturing them. ’Liza did not relish the imminent prospect of a lecture, however delicately administered, any more than ’Mily or Ann relished it. She had an uneasy consciousness [Pg 98]that Oliver would consider her a humbug, since she had really hardly any more topics to talk over with him than her sisters could find.

Above all, ’Liza knew in her inmost heart there were persons—young men—a young man whom, whoever the world might regard as well matched with her, she liked infinitely better than she could ever like Oliver Constable.

Oliver was a great scholar, and she was not nearly scholarly enough to be at home with him as she was with that other person, who chaffed her unmercifully about being a blue-stocking, but who, she was sure, nevertheless, looked up to her a little for her slender bookish attainments.

’Liza dreaded that ‘the word of’ Oliver would separate her from this more favoured aspirant to her regard.

On all these counts ’Liza was so reluctant and retiring when Oliver tried to ‘tackle’ her, as he called the process, on her reading, that [Pg 99]he felt—even in being foiled anew—at least he could triumphantly refute Fan’s unwomanly assertion that the Polley girls would be eager and unmaidenly in receiving and misinterpreting his advances.

Oliver never got beyond the discovery that ’Liza’s theory of poetry was decidedly that of rhyme; and she inclined strongly to what was meretriciously sentimental, especially when the sentiment was that of pairs of lovers meeting by sunset or moonlight, under oak trees, or in bowers of roses, or amidst ruins in churchyards. These persons swore eternal fidelity and incontinently died by violent deaths, or one of them proved false, as it were for the purpose of breaking the heart of the other, who continued, to Oliver’s mind, wrongheadedly faithful to a creature who was not worth a moment’s regret. When ’Liza strayed slightly from these stock scenes, it was into the superficial splendour of palaces, or at least into the height of hackneyed [Pg 100]picturesqueness as displayed in the castles and fortified towns, the crusades, sieges and battlefields of mediæval times. Followers at a humble distance of Moore, L.E.L., and Mrs. Hemans, constituted her antiquated school of poets.

It saddened Oliver to see that ’Liza’s faint poetic fancy could find no resting-place nearer home, and remained on that account utterly divorced from her daily life. It was like a wistful groping for better things far a field. It reminded him of the manlier sort of songs with which Jack Dadd and his comrades diversified their ‘If ever I cease to love’ and ‘Not for Joe.’ How the shop lads, who had not the remotest chance of being active participators in the open-air stir and joy of a hunting field, or who were in no danger of knowing any voyage more exciting than a holiday trip in a river steamer, would give the full force of their young lungs and hearts to the vigorous refrain of ‘John Peel’ or ‘The Bay of Biscay—O.’

Every year the shop people of Friarton showed themselves so united and independent as to have an excursion and picnic of their own, on one of their summer holidays.

It was something quite different from the day with their employers, which is such a popular piece of patronage on the part of large firms. The employés had nothing to do with this, they had their own day apart. It was the employers themselves, with their wives and families, who met [Pg 102]and agreed to disport themselves together. It was as if—supposing the example could be followed on a large scale—all the linendrapers and all the Italian warehousemen in London arranged to assemble with their households at some spot, as much more distant and more select than Epping Forest and Brighton as the masters’ claims to potentiality and dignity are beyond those of their young men and women.

Oliver Constable was prompt in supporting the usual celebration of the day, and in proposing to make one of the company in either of the two omnibuses engaged to carry the pleasure-seekers to their place of entertainment. He discovered to his chagrin that the party consisted chiefly of young people. An American fashion was setting in, which caused Mr. and Mrs. Dadd, and Mrs. Polley, with their contemporaries, not to refuse their countenance altogether, but to withdraw to a considerable extent their presence from the gala. They found the annual excursion, on the whole, a [Pg 103]little trying to people of mature years, and they were not impelled to make the sacrifice on their children’s account, since these worthy fathers and mothers were persuaded that their young people were perfectly able to take care of themselves at a picnic, and that to have their seniors looking on proved a restraint on the enjoyment of the juniors. Let the elderly people have their outing also, but let it be distinct and apart from that of the young people, whose limbs, wind, and hilarity were naturally so much more rampant.

But Oliver made so great a stand against this innovation on the part of his fellow-townsmen, and so set his heart on the fathers and mothers accompanying their sons and daughters, that though old Dadd and Mrs. Polley did not know what to think of the young fellow’s urgency, they yielded, and even pressed Mr. Holland, the minister of four-fifths of the shopkeepers of Friarton, into the service, to [Pg 104]accompany the excursionists and say grace at the picnic.

It was much more difficult to convince Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley that the revival of the presence of the elders was an advantage.

‘The guv’nor and his missus will only be in the way, and spoil sport; and what do we want with a feller in a white choker out of chapel? In fact, we have two of ’em; for Constable, though he means to be friendly, is a bit of a stick—all the worse, sometimes, that he don’t show his colours in his coat or his tie, or his hat,’ Jack grumbled and blustered; while ’Mily complained there would be no fun, and threatened not to go, but soon withdrew her threat.

For the first time in a number of summers, Fan Constable announced her intention of being one of the pleasure party. It was a solemn concession to sisterly duty. Oliver was such a fool (with a folly akin to that of Henry, [Pg 105]Earl of Morland, and not altogether removed from the madness of the Apostle Paul, when he became all things to all men,) that she could not trust him to spend a whole day in the fields with those riotous lads, and, above all, those bouncing or languishing girls, without the protection of her eye upon him and them.

Ungrateful Oliver had some words with Fan on her going in the spirit in which she went. ‘If you can’t make yourself agreeable, Fan, and do as others do, but must stand aloof with what they call fine-lady airs, you had better stay away,’ said Oliver, with a man’s brutal frankness.

‘I hope my manners will pass muster,’ retorted Fan loftily. ‘As to doing what others do, perhaps you will not object to my forming an exception, if the company begin to pelt each other with gooseberries, or to play at kiss in the ring.’

There might have been another recruit, or [Pg 106]couple of recruits, added to the forces, if Oliver had not rejected the suggestion peremptorily.

Harry Stanhope was beginning to find that yeoman work was not so entirely a manly pastime—like hunting and shooting—that it did not require all the play he could obtain to diversify it and prevent it from sinking into dull drudgery. He was not particular in his associates, but showed himself ready to knock up acquaintances in any class, and have a jolly lark with them at any time.

‘Won’t you take me with you to the turn-out?’ Harry put it insinuatingly to Fan. ‘You may fancy I should be in the way, but if they will let me drive one of the shandrydans, I’ll pledge myself you sha’n’t be spilt. Constable knows I’m good to handle the ribbons without an accident. It’s a thundering shame of Constable not to speak to my merits and Horry’s in this and in other respects, to leave us out in the cold, and go and enjoy himself like a selfish [Pg 107]beast. I’m convinced it ain’t your blame, Miss Constable, that we have not got a bit of paste-board, or whatever is necessary.’

It was not Fan’s blame, for when Oliver said ‘No, a hundred times, no,’ doggedly, and with nothing save a stern satisfaction in the consideration that he was robbing Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley of the delight of such an acquisition, Fan remonstrated with him privately. ‘Why can’t Mr. Stanhope go if we go, Oliver?’ she asked.

‘Good heavens, Fan! can’t you see the difference?’ demanded Oliver, out of all patience with the suggestion. ‘What business has Harry Stanhope with the Friarton tradespeople? Do you think he would go among them as his equals? He would go as he would intrude on a brewers’ bean-feast, or a bargemen’s saturnalia, or a meeting of thieves, or a pilgrimage to Mecca, without doubt or compunction, to see what he could see, and to [Pg 108]take his fun out of the proceedings, while some of the idiots engaged in them might imagine he was there in good faith, as one of themselves. Am I to be an accomplice in such treachery?’ Oliver’s broad shoulders went up to his ears, as he imagined Stanhope letting Jack Dadd suppose he was pumping him, or drawing ’Mily Polley out, and astounding her ignorant audacity.

‘It is a relief to hear that there are idiots who cannot be mistaken for gentlemen and ladies,’ was Fan’s parting shot. After all, she was not sorry that Harry Stanhope would not be present when she resumed her place in her father’s circle.

It will occur to every experienced person that the planning and carrying out of a large picnic, where the details are not confided to a public purveyor, or left to qualified servants, must be a little troublesome. But the amount of business in hurrying to and fro, consulting, [Pg 109]fussing and wrangling, which the annual excursion caused in Friarton, among businesspeople, too, who ought to have known how to supply the provisions required with the greatest despatch and the least difficulty, offered a curious speculation to Oliver. He found it the simplest matter in the world, by a single reference to Jim Hull, and to former estimates of contributions to the entertainment, to order and send to the managing committee the quota of pies, tarts, and what Jim generalised as ‘flummery,’ with which Constable’s bakehouse had always furnished the excursionists. Why could not all the entrusted butchers, fishmongers, and grocers do the same? He must conclude that they, or their wives and daughters for them, took pleasure in first creating, and then overcoming, obstacles and objections, though Mrs. Polley asserted she was ‘that wore out’ with all she had undergone in conducting the preparations and putting down the senseless proposals [Pg 110]of some people, that she would a deal rather have three market-days on end.

The young women did not give much help, though they ran backwards and forwards incessantly between the houses of the chief managers, for three days preceding the excursion. The girls’ principal interest was absorbed by their costumes for the occasion. As they had imparted every detail to each other long before, and as they saw each other every day—both in slovenly deshabilles and what might be called smart toilettes—Oliver stupidly failed to see how the dresses could be of much consequence to anybody.

What attention the young people had to spare was bestowed more on the style of the feast, and the good things which were to figure at it, than on the locality of the picnic. Oliver imagined this lack of concern in what was, in a measure, the object of the ten miles’ drive—the visit to a well-known ‘hanger,’ or [Pg 111]high wooded bank, which sloped down to Buller’s Brook—might arise from the circumstance that the same bourn had formed the termination of the expedition ever since he could remember. The place was pretty and suitable enough, but there were other places, a little nearer, or a little farther off—an old deserted mansion, with a park open on certain conditions to the public; an ancient church, a treasure to archæologists; a bend of the Brook, famous for water-lilies; while variety was charming. He ventured to name a different halting-place, and was put down for a reason which proved unanswerable to his audience, and which he could not set aside. There was a rarely used barn near Finchhanger, and the owner placed it at the disposal of the company in case of rain. In a climate like ours, such a retreat with its possibilities of indoor games and dancing—even to no better music than impromptu whistling and singing—to while [Pg 112]away the lagging hours, was what no wise man could ask his neighbours to despise. And the probability of seeking refuge in the barn was rather in the ascendancy this year; not because the skies were more inclined to weep than usual, but because Jack Dadd had struck out the brilliant improvement of taking down a detachment of the volunteer band on the top of his omnibus, and, as everybody knew, dancing on the grass was better in theory than practice.

Oliver ended by being sceptical whether a change of place, even if he could have answered for the weather, would have gained his end or proved acceptable to anybody save himself perhaps. That was after he had spoken on the rival merits of the old park and church before ’Mily Polley. ‘Oh! bother the place!’ cried ’Mily frankly; ‘who cares for the place? One is as good as another, and then there is the barn. I rather hope the rain will only stop off till we’ve got there, and after that come down [Pg 113]in a pelt this year, so as to send us all in where we can eat comfortable, without old Bales’ (to wit the senior Mr. Dadd, with his rotund figure and his linendrapery business) ‘keeping us waiting till he has poked about and hunted out the least damp spot for his lumbago, and mother [Pg 114]has made a fright of herself by tying her pocket-handkerchief round her throat to guard against a crick in the neck. And have you heard of young Scissors being so sharp as to secure ever so many of your band with their instruments, in case we should have nothing else to do but take a hop? I’m sure I don’t know that we could do anything better. Oh, I say, Mr. Oliver, I’ll tell you what is of a great deal more consequence than a park when we ain’t proposing to pick cowslips, or a church when none of us means to get married just at present. Will you see—a word at headquarters mayn’t be amiss—that Jim Hull of yours lets us have oyster and lobster patties this year instead of cherry pies? “I’m so partial,” as ’Liza says, I would give my ears for oyster patties. And oh! fancy Jack Dadd has got his father to fork out two bottles of sherry and two of champagne—the real, not the gooseberry thing, instead of the lemonade, which was all we used to have. I don’t care for sherry, but “I adore champagne,” that’s ’Liza again. I should like to swig it like beer—that’s me. But sha’n’t we have a guzzle?’

’Mily called a spade a spade. Oliver was reminded of a market-day when he had seen a stout country lass gazing longingly into the window of the shop which Jim Hull had caused to be filled with tarts and cakes for the occasion. The rustic damsel had great difficulty in tearing herself away from the contemplation; as she did so she exclaimed with effusion to a companion, ‘I could eat the whole window full.’

Oliver sought to make atonement for his recoil from ’Mily’s speech, by honestly weighing the comparative demerits of what might be [Pg 115]classed as gluttony and gourmandism. It was the fashion for some ‘great swells,’ as ’Mily would have called them, not only to indulge in the last, but to boast of the practice, and hold it up to admiration as an elegant accomplishment—an essential element of high civilisation. ‘Plain living and high thinking’ were exploded with them also.

‘If you will allow me,’ said Oliver meekly, ‘I’ll mix claret cup for you.’

‘Thank you for nothing.’ ’Mily rejected the proposal flippantly. ‘Nasty flat trash. I’m for as much champagne as I can get for my share, without mother interfering. There!’

Had ‘the girl of the period,’ with the fine fast tone which was found to have such a rousing effect on the jaded languor and formal worldly propriety of Mayfair, come down to dwell among the shopkeepers of Friarton?

Oliver showed himself so far amenable to domestic and feminine influence as to make [Pg 116]the concession to Fan’s having vouchsafed her company, and as it were pledged herself to civility, of taking his place with her in the omnibus of her choice—that which did not contain Jack Dadd and his detachment from the volunteer band. But even without Jack and his musical performers—who took time by the forelock, and were guilty of such enthusiasm in their duties as to seize their instruments at the very moment of starting, and fill the air with a truly military combination of fife and drum, serving as a summons to the rest of the townspeople to contemplate the setting forth of the shopkeepers on their great holiday—the other omnibus, filled with a company of girls dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, with rivulets of curls running in every direction; matrons with bonnets which supported thickets of flowers among cascades of lace; and men in their Sunday suits, was in itself so hilarious and so unconscious of any just cause for moderating [Pg 117]its hilarity, that the girls’ giggles rose into screams of laughter, the matrons shouted through the din to each other, and the men outshouted their womankind, until the one vehicle was as noisy in a different way as the other.

‘Ain’t you a glum sort?’ a brother-volunteer said, in the freedom of the moment, to Oliver.

‘No,’ Oliver denied, ‘but I don’t see why I should disturb my neighbours with my pleasure.’

‘Oh! as to that,’ the other merrymaker turned off the implied censure, ‘though we ain’t workpeople, we don’t take our pleasures so often that we should hold ourselves in when we do, lest we should disturb them as has no business save pleasure.’

It was true enough, and it was also true that here was an instance of Englishmen’s not taking their pleasure sadly. After all, it was a mere ebullition of excitement at starting, so far as the seniors were concerned. Very soon such [Pg 118]members of the party as old Dadd and Mrs. Polley subsided into sobriety, verging on drowsiness and tartness, although their manners might not have the repose

But it was in the very height of the outburst, when Fan looked as if she could have crept beneath her seat to hide her diminished head, and Oliver drew down on himself the accusation of being ‘a glum sort,’ that the omnibus rattled past the Meadows, and revealed near the gate, through the vista of thick shrubs, Mrs. Hilliard throwing up her plump white hands in comic protest at the glare and blare of the cavalcade, with the share taken in it by her cousins—half a dozen times removed. For of course as Louisa Hilliard knew everything, she had been made aware beforehand that Fan and Oliver were to be there. She was stationed at the best point to get a passing glimpse of them. She meant them to see her also, and she indulged [Pg 119]in that gesture with the mischievous intention of conveying to the brother and sister her pretended opinion that they two were at the bottom of all that blazing colour and deafening noise.

Catherine Hilliard with her dogs stood just behind her cousin. She had been lured to the spot without guessing what was to happen. She was in the act of turning away with fretful impatience to avoid the disagreeable shock of the spectacle. It was in violent antagonism to the shadowy, stately world in which she lived, much as a group from the crowded sands at Margate in the season is in opposition to a trio from a Greek play. If she never interfered with the employments and enjoyments of those human beings who had nothing in common with her—save the same origin in the first, and, it was to be hoped, the same interest in the second, Adam—why should they roughly intrude on her notice, compelling her attention and summarily [Pg 120]dissolving the spell of memories and fancies which formed her refuge?

When Finchhanger was reached, there was no time wasted in walking about, though the day, which had begun by being doubtful, was turning out fine. The dinner was the great event of the day, and till it was accomplished successfully—nay, triumphantly, it was not to be thought that any of the picnic party could care for anything else. Oliver, while he cast a regretful glance on the fleeting lights and shades on wood and water which his companions were overlooking, admitted the reasonableness of the principle when a picnic without servants was in question. He was thankful at least for the absence of false assumption. He laboured to fall in with the requirements of the moment. He put himself in the experienced hands of Jack Dadd, with the intention of acting under him in the capacity of an amateur waiter, in spite of Oliver’s peculiar disqualifications [Pg 121]for that onerous office, and though he had the mortification to receive regularly, after the discharge of every two out of three commissions entrusted to him, a plain dismissal, though it was couched in tones of jovial mockery and recalled the next moment. ‘Get along with you, Constable, you are only in a man’s way. Was that the style in which you handled plates and knives at your University spreads? You must have been a rare blessing to the crockery shops. I’m blowed if I know how you escaped losing half your cutlery, or carving your own hands and feet. You had better attempt to carry them with your toes, or in your teeth at once. My good feller, you ought to have stuck to your books. You ain’t fit for the ordinary business of life.’

No fault could be found either with Fan’s qualifications or behaviour—in so far as rendering every assistance with a fine capacity and expertness which were in broad contrast to [Pg 122]Oliver’s helpless, hopeless gaucheries. If she had only not been so much in earnest in her work!

‘Drat it!’ Jack Dadd broke out aside to ’Liza and ’Mily Polley, who were languishing and romping over the tasks assigned them, not showing a tithe of the power to become excellent table-maids which Fan displayed. ‘I can’t stand Fan Constable, though she’ll have everything put out in apple-pie order before we can say Jack Robinson. I wish she would sit down. Ain’t she going about setting us an example how to mind our businesses, as if we were all in shop or at Sunday-school? I’ll throw a dish at her head before I’ve done,’—an extreme expression of feeling which delighted his hearers immensely.

But as Fan was very much in earnest at all times, Oliver could hardly complain of her conduct in this instance, and certainly he could not call her aside and reproach her for devoting [Pg 123]herself for the rest of the day to a girl far more delicate than ’Liza Polley, who had come out in her anxiety not to lose the excursion when she was quite unfit for the fatigue.

Oliver had already made more than one private note to study at leisure the amount of sickliness among the girls of his class in Friarton. He was reluctant to ascribe any proportion of it worth mentioning to those Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun illnesses which Mrs. Polley attributed unhesitatingly to the sufferers having ‘tucked into’ stuffed goose and plum pudding, ducklings and pancakes, the first pickled walnuts, sliced cucumbers and greengage tarts, according to the season. ‘Girls—and boys too for that matter—will take their treats without any thought of the consequences,’ she said, referring to the mode in which dissenters still emulate good church people in keeping those festivals which their chapel ignores otherwise. But Oliver preferred to believe the unsatisfactory [Pg 124]bill of health was the result of a wilful and wonderful ignorance of God’s laws of physical life in such elementary obligations as have to do with fresh air, regular exercise, scrupulous cleanliness, enough and suitable clothing, not too much food, together with a sustaining interest and object in existence—even that subject to the injunction to be temperate in all things.

The evil effects of these neglected and outraged laws must be intensified in the case of girls, whose indolent and self-indulgent practices alternating with spasmodic exertions in any occupation they could not possibly avoid or really cared about, and in the pursuit of such pleasure as came in their way, exposed them to grave harm, which men, by their established tasks and better balanced habits, avoided. The aimlessness, with a single signal reservation, of these girls’ lives tended also to mental vacuity and its train of disorders.

There was only one disadvantage from [Pg 125]which the average tradesmen’s daughters of Friarton were happily exempted: that was the unsatisfied craving, the wearing away and eating into itself, of such a nature as Catherine Hilliard’s, over-stimulated and cultivated to the utmost, but finding no essentially human food for its support, or field for its exercise.

Oliver could not blame Fan, though he could have wished her less grave and absorbed in her philanthropy. At the same time he was sensible that everybody, except Celia Reid, whom Fan was waiting upon, looked askance at her present benevolence as at her previous diligence. ‘It ain’t natural in a girl to come out for a day’s pleasure and shelve herself at a moment’s notice, that she may nurse the first person as has a headache or is sickified. She might have left that to one of the older people. It is just like Fan Constable with her airs. We ain’t good enough for her to enjoy herself with us, but she will play the Good Samaritan for [Pg 126]our benefit—set her up! Celia Reid is a mean-spirited thing to give in and allow it. Could not she have stopped at home rather than afford Miss Fan a back-door to get out of, that she might not feel obliged to be free and pleasant like the other girls?’

Oliver clearly comprehended the judgment that was passed on Fan’s sister-of-mercy performance; but he had no idea that he, with his eyes open and a very different disposition towards the company, ran any risk of being indicted for a similar offence.

It was Oliver Constable’s misfortune that he could no more make a speech, unless under high pressure, than he could dance a minuet; so that when there was toast-giving chiefly to thank old Dadd, who sat at the foot of the table-cloth, and the matron who presided at the head, Oliver went through a halting, stuttering formula, at the expense of a good deal of colloquial Saxon, common-sense, and mother wit, thus failing again ignominiously—this time in the very help which his companions considered they had a right to expect at his hand, or rather mouth. A fluent speech, well garnished with Latin quotations [Pg 128]which nobody would have understood, might have lent an éclat to this part of the day’s programme, and carried off some of the tedium. If a young man who had received Oliver’s education, could not deliver such a speech, his friends had a right to be disappointed, aggrieved and disgusted—especially as Oliver, by moving to secure the attendance of the old fogies at the picnic, had brought down upon the more juvenile members of the company the revival of an obsolete rite, which nobody relished save old Dadd, who entertained the delusion that he was good at a funny speech. The result of Oliver’s incompetency here, was as if he had got his associates into a trap and left them in the lurch.

There Constable sat, after his disgraceful break-down, with his long legs very much in their owner’s, as well as in everybody else’s way, as mute as a fish. When Mr. Dadd succeeded in introducing, in a sentence of [Pg 129]his reply to the sorry compliment which had been paid to him, a handsome reference to a pair of young friends as had not always been present at their blow-outs—but better late than never—and he could wish no happier thing to the young gentleman and lady than that they might be speedily provided with partners both at home and abroad, Oliver, carefully refraining from a glance at Fan and with all eyes fixed on himself, was content to utter a curt ‘Thank you,’ while he held up his glass before his reddened face so clumsily that he occasioned a diversion by pouring half the wine down Mrs. Dadd’s silk sleeve. She was so humble that she would not allow him to do what he could to remedy the accident, but of course there was a stain just above the elbow. Anyone with half an eye might see how much she was annoyed, from the way in which her husband, who could read her looks, interrupted his speech, by pulling out his handkerchief and offering it to her to rub the [Pg 130]spot, while he remarked in a half-audible aside to his next neighbours that he and Jack would not hear the end of that ’ere stupid accident of Constable’s, till they forked out another silk gown to mother, when by rights Constable the villain ought to pay the piper.

Constable would willingly have paid the piper if he had known how to do it, without implying patronage and offence. It was the last of his thoughts to act as a kill-joy at the picnic. He strove with the usual failure of such striving to be social. He could not make a speech fit for the occasion, but to Fan’s disdain he was one of the first to consent to sing in his fairly tuneful voice. He chose advisedly the pretty old people’s-song, ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill.’ But his choice of a song proved one of Oliver’s many failures with the best intentions. If the lass were ever meant for such an audience, all its younger members at least had grown away from her influence. They had as little appreciation [Pg 131]of her attractions as of her designation. The ‘young ladies’ present would not have relished the word ‘lass’ applied to any of them, and would not have cared to be admired for such hum-drum and homely qualities as those which had inspired the poet. The greater portion of the listeners barely freed Oliver Constable from the injurious suspicion of singing down to their standard, while they took care to express a little supercilious surprise at his taste in songs, and to talk of this particular specimen as ‘an old-fashioned thing’ with no ‘go’ in it. He would have done a great deal better if he had made fools of them by offering them the old doggrel of the mad scholar, which Jack Dadd had somehow picked up, and which he flung at Oliver with a mocking ‘Look here, Constable, I’ll tip you a college stave.’

[Pg 132]

That rant brought down a round of applause, while the gentle charm of the ‘Lass of Richmond Hill’ fell flat.

There was a little of the freedom of manner which Fan had indicated at the close of the meal, either because the serious business of the day being well over, there was a reactionary tendency to frolicking, or for the alarming reason that old Dadd’s champagne had proved exceptionally heady and had taken extraordinary effect on heads not accustomed to the potation.

’Mily Polley had kept the ‘merry thought’ of her wing of a fowl to pull with Jack Dadd, and when she failed to secure the longer half of the bone, she was so left to herself as to toss her share into Jack’s waistcoat. Jack was still farther left to himself, though it was only a rose which he plucked from his button-hole and aimed at her ducked head. However, the precedent was ominous and the selection of missiles might not have continued so judicious.

[Pg 133]

Fortunately Mr. Holland succeeded in establishing a humorous clerical veto. ‘Come, come, you young people,’ he protested affably, ‘you must not take to throwing about things. It ain’t safe. How do you know but you might catch me in the eye? It would be a pretty job if I had to appear with a black eye in your chapel pulpit on Sunday. I ain’t sure, though all my deacons are here, that I should escape censure.’

‘Hang it,’ muttered the dissentient voice of Jack Dadd amidst the clamorous approval of the joke, ‘what though we bunged up both his eyes, if he means to sit upon us now. We ain’t priest-ridden Pussyites.’

In reality Jack cherished no evil feeling towards his pastor, only the young fellow looked upon it as manly and swellish to express a certain amount of defiance of clergymen and contempt for their order. He liked to shock those of his fair companions who regarded sacerdotal pretensions [Pg 134]more respectfully, but who had no objections to being shocked into crying out at such a culprit as Jack Dadd.

Oliver valiantly fought against pronouncing a judgment on the little interlude, by comparing it in his own mind to what Horace Walpole has described of a scrimmage he witnessed in a box at Vauxhall or Ranelagh between the members of Lady Petersham’s party, after supper. Only a hundred years ago such incidents occurred in public among the leaders of the great world, and, at the worst, ’Mily Polley was a thousand times less objectionable than the disreputable fine-lady, and Jack Dadd than her drunken profligate squires. Oliver would certainly point out to Fan the analogy between the scenes, emphasising the fact that a certain Bohemian picturesqueness—and blackguardism belonging to the first, were lacking in the second.

As the afternoon sun still shone, and only a light south-western breeze tempered the heat [Pg 135]gratefully, even the greatest devotees to dancing and the barn among the company found themselves reluctantly compelled to take advantage of the unwonted favour shown to them by the weather, and to forego still their favourite resource. The party was a picnic, ostensibly an out-of-doors party when the state of the sky would permit, and there remained so much unvitiated simplicity and matter-of-factness among its members as to deter them from behaviour out of keeping with their professed purpose.

There might be considerable inconvenience in carrying it out, such as was involved in the obligation of the presence of the volunteer band, Mr. Dadd’s tendency to lumbago, Mrs. Polley’s fears of cricks in the neck, and the common lively irrational horror of the whole insect world with the exception of butterflies, another relic of the prejudices of the company’s betters in the past; but since the clouds would not collect—strange reluctance—or the fine [Pg 136]weather break-down, these men and women were prepared to go manfully and womanfully through their parts, with a kind of heavy loyalty.

The seniors sauntered aimlessly here and there, sat uncomfortably on the tree stumps, staring at nothing, and only waxed animated when everyday interests came to the surface in their desultory conversation. Oliver caught snatches of old Dadd’s harangue on the fall in calicos and Mrs. Polley’s animadversion on the rise in lemons—together with the complaints of all the men of the sauciness of apprentices, and of all the women of the incompetency of maids-of-all-work, between stray notes of robins, the rustle of falling leaves, and the trickle of water. Oliver wished with all his heart that the undertones of nature which her guests had come out to hear, had been more attended to, and had risen loud enough to drown the clatter of trade. As it was, he rather admired the elderly people’s [Pg 137]politeness in veiling their impatience for tea, the second gipsy meal of those who were so unlike gipsies, and concealing the alacrity with which they should start on the homeward drive.

The juniors played games and danced under difficulties on the uneven ground, among the long grass, to the fife and drum band. Oliver could not screw up his courage to the point of attempting such precarious polking, while Fan continued engrossed with her opportune patient. But Fan’s brother exerted himself to play for two in blind-man’s-buff, till the players, tired of the sport, found more scope for amusement in perpetrating audacious thefts on the articles of apparel their companions had laid aside in order to join in the dance or the game with comfort and spirit—the victims making frantic efforts to recover their lost property.

Oliver could not be guilty of the liberty Jack Dadd took in possessing himself of a girl’s hat and veil, sticking it on his own head and [Pg 138]proving what a vagabond-looking young woman he would have made, as he rushed here and there, through the wood, pursued by the owner of the hat. When another girl ventured to pull out a glove which had been dangling from Oliver’s pocket, he suffered her to keep it, possibly more to her surprise than her satisfaction. It was pure child’s play, but Oliver had grown too old and modest in his civilisation to be able for child’s play, at which both players and lookers on, to his discomfiture, ‘laughed consumedly.’

Poor Oliver! his was an anxious and thankless office which he had assumed at his own charges, and Fan’s earnestness, threatening to become a family quality, infected him in its discharge. Harry Stanhope, who was no reformer, would have impartially scattered merry-thoughts and posies, purloined girls’ attire and pranked himself in it, when he saw it was the humour of his neighbours, without a scruple and [Pg 139]with considerable diversion to himself in the process.

To cover his shy withdrawal Oliver was betrayed into committing his cardinal mistake at the picnic. He stumbled unconsciously into what all those present regarded as Fan’s track. There were two plain retiring elderly women of the party whom the majority of its members reckoned decidedly beneath their rank. But the Miss Barrs were respectably connected, they had always been at the excursion, and they were undoubtedly proprietresses of a green-grocer’s shop, not merely grey-headed shop girls. Oliver was first attracted to them by their comparative isolation in the crowd, and then by the circumstance that one of the sisters was quietly searching for, and gathering, a nosegay of such aromatic wild flowers as summer spares, not merely picking a few at random and dropping them carelessly the next moment, while she was far past the age of coquettishly [Pg 140]disposing of the last stray rose, or plume of the queen of the meadow, in the demure bonnet which she wore instead of a smart hat.

Oliver was reminded of his baker who had the sneaking kindness for butterflies. He actually introduced himself to Miss Nancy Barr, and it compensated for a good deal which had jarred upon him in the course of the day, when he made the agreeable discovery that Miss Nancy really had considerable knowledge of wild flowers and a genuine regard for them. She had once lived with an uncle who had been a schoolmaster endowed with a love of nature and botany, she was tolerably well acquainted not only with the general appearance and properties of plants, but with old superstitions and lingering traditional virtues attached to them. She was a fairly intelligent woman, especially on this subject, which was akin to her walk in trade, and when Oliver made use of the old poet’s words,

[Pg 141]

she brightened up and said she had heard her uncle read those lines. He found she was further familiar with the flowers summoned to lament the friend of John Milton who bade the ‘daffodillies’ fill their cups with tears; and she could herself repeat part of the catalogue of herbs in Shenstone’s Schoolmistress’s garden:—

Oliver was as much amazed and elated as if he had encountered one of the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ so often referred to. In the innocence of his heart he proceeded to cultivate the acquaintance of ‘a rational human being,’ as he called her, rendering the process conspicuous by sundry darts into the wood, and dives down to the brink of the Brook, as his eye was caught by a specimen of winter-green or horehound [Pg 142]which he could procure for her. She was a plain elderly woman, quite old enough to be his mother. She and her sister had appeared neglected at the picnic, a circumstance which was in itself a patent reason for such small atonement as lay in the power of Oliver or any other promoter of the feast. But if he could only have realised it, the social reformer had placed himself under a tyranny as great as any he could encounter in this world. A glare of light like that on a throne was cast on all he did. A score of eyes, which did not seem to be seeing him, were, in fact, recording his every action and commenting on it, weighing him in the balance and finding him wanting.

‘I do believe Constable is low-lifed,’ said ’Mily Polley to Jack Dadd, borrowing Jack’s masculine use of the surname where his friend was concerned; ‘or is he stuck-up, after all, like Fan? Is this to show us he is condescending from the highest to the lowest, and it may as [Pg 143]well be the lowest to prove the depth of his condescension? Good gracious! to think of his paying attention to an old frump like Turnips.’

‘It is a queer taste,’ said Jack lazily, while he lolled on the bank by the lady’s side.

‘I can tell you,’ said ’Mily in confidence, ‘I don’t think it’s the best of usage to our ’Liza, whom he’s letting walk about with only Bella Willet, after he has given us some cause to think he was making up to ’Liza.’

‘Serve ’Liza right for jumping at a newcomer because of his college education, as has only made a donkey of him to begin with, and because he has got hold of his father’s business and tin, which, as sure as I live, he’ll make ducks and drakes of before he dies,’ said Jack sardonically.

But after Jack had gloated a little longer on the edifying spectacle of ’Liza’s discomfiture in being reduced to the company of one of her [Pg 144]own sex, while she underwent the double humiliation of seeing ‘Turnips’ preferred to her, his good-nature led him to quit ’Mily, who was at no loss to find a substitute for her attendant, and go to ’Liza, though his sympathy took the doubtful form of teasing her with chaff about her rival. Still, ’Liza had the comfort of being quits in the end with Oliver, who remained profoundly ignorant of the whole by-play.

It was one of the established customs of the day at Finchhanger that those girls—not tom-boys and pickles, or humbler cynics like ’Mily Polley, who held the practice in strong contempt as strictly belonging to idiots of shop girls and low lads of Sunday-school teachers—should bring back rural trophies from the picnic, in fast-withering, limply-dangling wreaths of oak leaves and ferns, obscuring and imperilling the real gum flowers in the girls’ hats. Sometimes an obliging young man consented to have his hat or cap—in the band of which he would on [Pg 145]other occasions rollickingly stick his pipe or railway ticket—similarly decorated by willing if bungling fingers, with such spoils as Ophelia gave her life for. And it was Oliver who, at this picnic, under the severe eyes of Fan—supporting Celia Reid’s head on her shoulder to prevent her patient from fainting away—weakly submitted to ’Liza Polley, with recovered spirits, decking his miller’s hat with briony. He was thinking of the summer roses round his mill-house window, and of what he had counted his only opportunity of being crowned like an ancient Greek. But Mrs. Polley began pursing up her mouth, and even Polley looked knowing and important.

As for ’Mily, she asked Jack Dadd if it was to be his turn next, and Jack answered with more plainness than politeness that he would not make such an ass of himself.

‘Like Bottom the weaver,’ said Oliver, with reckless waste of simile.

[Pg 146]

‘Well, it is more in the way of rubbish of weavers than of any fellers that I have been accustomed to keep company with,’ said Jack loftily, giving Oliver a lesson in good manners. In spite of it, and of his self-consciousness, Oliver wore the hat and its ill-arranged garniture with an excellent assumption of composure on the return to Friarton.

Before the autumn had well begun, while the Stanhopes flattered themselves they were like the other farmers in the heat of harvest work, their only sister was permitted to come on a visit to them at Copley Grange Farm, and she entered into the situation with girlish relish equal to, though different from, Harry’s.

Agneta Stanhope’s seventeen years of life had been dull and monotonous, and apart from the ordinary experiences of girlhood, though she had suffered no outward privations during their progress. The childless aunt who had volunteered to take the little girl in charge, had [Pg 148]been faithful according to Mrs. Stanhope’s light. She had taken care to provide Agne—that her own expense certainly—with a good governess and skilled masters. Mrs. Stanhope had been conscientious in making it a point that the child should have every material comfort, and she and her governess had shared all the advantages, which Mrs. Stanhope held fit for them, that could be derived from General Stanhope’s position and income. Agneta had always been duly recognised as the niece and adopted daughter of the house, whether in town or country. She had even found a little establishment formed for her own especial well-being at the seaside, when other children were sent there. In short, Agneta had been treated with perfect humanity and consideration, and could lay no claim to being the persecuted, neglected orphan child of romance. But the General and his wife were neither of them particularly fond of children, though they did not call the grapes which had [Pg 149]not been given to them sour. Accepting with philosophic adaptability the lot which they regarded as assigned to them, they replaced private by public interests. The couple went much into society and travelled a great deal. They were spirited, intelligent, liberal-minded in a conventional way, decidedly popular, and overwhelmed with engagements.

To such a pair, though they fulfilled their obligations to Agneta in a perfectly honourable well-bred manner, the child and girl was of small account—at least till she was old enough to come out formally, go into company with her guardians, and obtain the establishment which Mrs. Stanhope felt bound to put in her way.

Indeed, Agneta had seen as little of her uncle and aunt as was compatible with their relations. She had spent nearly the whole of her short life in schoolrooms, within the confines of a park and a few neighbouring lanes, or in the narrower bounds of West-end squares [Pg 150]and gardens—on marine parades, or occasionally for a change on the promenades of foreign watering places. She had been largely consigned to the companionship of an unexceptionable elderly governess, who had become a martinet, with the most of any originality or spirit she had ever possessed pressed out of her by the exigencies of a long and toilsome professional career. It was little wonder that Miss Dennison, though she was all that her certificates proclaimed her and Mrs. Stanhope’s fancy painted her, as a well-born, well-bred, well-principled woman, whose solid education had not been entirely neglected, while her French accent was that of a native, and her music and drawing those of an accomplished amateur, proved still not a congenial companion for a girl whose heart was stirring and fluttering with the ardent impulses of that spring-time, which when repressed into a walk is all the readier the next moment to break out in a gallop. Indeed [Pg 151]Miss Dennison was chiefly concerned—so far as the duties of her office would allow—with securing the ease and rest which she had laboriously earned.

It happened also that there were few contemporary young people among those branches of Agneta Stanhope’s father’s and mother’s families, the heads of which troubled themselves, amidst the distractions of modern life, to remember her existence and send her invitations to spend some of her holidays in their circles.

Beyond her family connections, there was an embargo laid by Mrs. Stanhope, and especially by Miss Dennison, in her increasing scrupulousness and dislike to interruptions of her routine, on juvenile friends for Agneta, beyond a very select few, until the girl grew up with hardly a playfellow or intimate companion save her brothers, who had only been with her at brief intervals, separated by long spaces of time.

The visits of Harry and Horry at the [Pg 152]General’s had been the bright spots in Agneta’s life which had aroused the young humanity in her and kept it from stagnation. To Harry especially she had owed the greatest enjoyments in keeping with her years which she had ever known. Harry, a manly little fellow from childhood, had always been rather fond and proud of his younger sister, and had shown himself as careful of her, and indulgent to her, as could be expected from his habitual thoughtlessness, though he had never dreamt of ranking her with Horry in his regard, or supposing that he owed to her the same allegiance. He and Horry had never been sundered. Horry was in a measure necessary to Harry, as Harry was to Horry, while Agneta had merely proved a pet and play-thing now and then, and, after all, was but a girl, who belonged by rights to Aunt Julia and the General—not to the lads.

Horace, in his infirmity with its attendant jealousy, had been tempted to look upon Agneta [Pg 153]as an interloper between him and his brother, and it had only been Harry’s staunchness to both which had preserved the fraternal bond intact in either case. Harry was the medium, not only of communication—seeing that Horry peevishly complained he could never hear his sister’s soft treble voice—but of such mild family affection as subsisted between the other two.

Most girls in Agneta Stanhope’s class would find it difficult to conceive that a fortnight’s stay with her brothers, in the rusticity of their new estate, could be a treat of treats to Agneta, having all that was wanting to render it ‘perfectly exquisite,’ in the extravagance of her girlish speech, supplied by the misfortune of Miss Dennison’s being attacked by influenza on the eve of their setting out, and so prevented from accompanying her pupil. ‘Poor dear old Madam Punctilio, as Harry wickedly nicknames her,’ reflected Agneta gleefully; ‘she would undoubtedly have been in the way and spoiled so much. Since [Pg 154]she is in no danger and is not suffering particularly, while she misses nothing by being detained in her comfortable quarters at Thornley Lodge and escaping the worse than bachelors’ housekeeping at the Farm, it is not cruel, is it? to be a little glad that she has become so opportunely ill?’

Unfortunately Mrs. Stanhope had not anticipated the possibility of the accident, when she consented, with considerable hesitation and reluctance, to allow Agneta to go to her brothers for a couple of weeks.

But Mrs. Stanhope could not bring herself to separate entirely the members of the same family, though Harry and Horace had been disappointing in failing to develop any faculties their friends could lay hold of, to push them on in the world, and in the stupid lads’ obstinately sticking to each other, so as to make matters worse, until this miserable dernier ressort of a farm had to be tolerated for them, still the [Pg 155]young men had not done anything which could warrant their aunt in forbidding their sister to visit them. As an habitual practice, of course, living with her brothers in their primitive establishment, was not to be thought of for Agneta. Her prospects must be considered in the first place; her time was not to be wasted. But she had not yet come out, she had not gone far beyond the point when childhood and girlhood meet. If ever the liberty were to be permitted, here was the opportunity when she would incur the least observation, and run the slightest risk. For Miss Dennison would still be responsible, since it would be as her pupil, in her charge, that Agneta should go to Copley Grange Farm. And very likely a single trial of the life on which her brothers had resolved—a species of Robinson Crusoe isolation—rather than any steep decline into a lower stratum of society, in Mrs. Stanhope’s mind, would rob the girl of any farther inclination to go to them.

[Pg 156]

When the expedition was about to start into the wilds, and Miss Dennison broke down against all calculation, Mrs. Stanhope was heavily hampered by the nature of her own engagements. It was an impossibility for her to sacrifice herself and them, so far as to undertake to chaperon Agneta and countenance Harry and Horace, even for the matter of a couple of days, in their yeoman establishment, where she knew her presence must create the greatest disturbance. She could not attempt another compensating alteration in the programme. She did not see herself warranted in anticipating Agneta’s entrance on the great world, and her career, by carrying her niece with her for the gaieties of a race week, to which Mrs. Stanhope and the General were pledged.

Mrs. Stanhope, in the hurry of the dilemma, seemed to see herself compelled to send Agneta, to the girl’s unbounded delight, to Copley [Pg 157]Grange Farm, under no more qualified escort than that of a steady old waiting-maid.

Mrs. Stanhope’s chief dependence was on the brothers’ having sufficient esprit de corps, where their sister was concerned, to look after her when she was with them. Then Agneta, in her own person, was not so destitute of dawning discretion as to run straightway into mischief for the short interval of time during which she was to be Harry and Horace’s guest.

The very first use which Harry made of his guardianship was to carry Agneta to Friarton Mill. ‘I have brought over my sister Aggie to you, Miss Constable, that you may be a friend to her also,’ said Harry in his winning way, which was not so much graciously affable as frankly confiding in the friendliness of his kind.

Fan was more than proud and pleased, she was deeply gratified by the trust, and grateful for it. It raised her in her own estimation, and [Pg 158]she was satisfied it would elevate her in that of others. If Harry Stanhope chose to commit his young sister to the care of Fan—of all people—during Agneta Stanhope’s stay at the Farm, it showed not only his conviction of Fan’s claims to be a gentlewoman, it proved to Fan that her own instincts of ladyhood had been correct and genuine.

As for Agneta, she went into still greater raptures over lovely old Friarton Mill than over the quaint antiquated farmhouse. She privately included Miss Constable, who had been so good to Agneta’s ‘boys,’ who was such a nice, pretty, quiet-looking little woman in her mourning, in her enthusiastic admiration. Miss Constable was quick to guess her—Agneta’s—wishes, and was evidently going to be very kind to her. With regard to the big, awkward, but gentlemanlike—Agneta knew a gentleman when she saw him—master of the house, whom Harry was so impertinent as to call to his face ‘the [Pg 159]Miller,’ he was even a more wonderful novelty than his sister.

Agneta prized all the enchanting wonder, strangeness, and freedom of the new world she had entered, with the vivid appreciation of a girl who had been kept strictly in leading-strings all her days, who had followed one narrow, worn path till it was direly commonplace and stale to her, who, in the middle of a continual round of book-teaching, was as profoundly ignorant of the work-a-day world, and the struggling, suffering, rejoicing, sorrowing life lived on every side of her, as if she were a novice in a convent parlour.

To rise two or three hours before her accustomed time the one day, to have breakfast standing on the parlour table till noon the next—since Harry was fitful, to say the least, in his practices of getting up and taking his meals—formed an agreeable variety on Miss Dennison’s petrified virtues of punctuality and method. [Pg 160]To be invested with the important functions involved in pouring out coffee for Harry and Horry was flattering to Agneta’s still starved vanity. To have no tasks in Ariosto, Corneille, and Schiller—which, though custom enabled her to get through them glibly, the absence of all student affinities rendered irksome—was a sensible relief to her. Instead, Agneta could dawdle in the porch or in the shadow of the great pear-tree in the paddock, and read one of Harry’s red-and-yellow railway-stall volumes. She could not dip far into it, certainly, without noticing that it was as horribly ‘loud’ inside as out. But it was also new and exciting like everything else on this untrodden ground. Its characters bounced and struggled after a robust fashion, did not trip or stalk in a shadowy manner, as the heroes and heroines of her classics had tripped and stalked to Agneta.

To be exonerated from practising was another huge boon to a girl who was not intensely [Pg 161]musical, and to whom the news that there was no piano in the house sounded the best of jokes.

The small, austerely plain farmhouse, with the ‘lean-to’ preserving a venerable houseleek which flaunted over the greater portion of the sloping roof, was out of all proportion to its large offices where they stood massed together,

The voices of poultry resounded through the shaggy paddock. Cowslips and primroses, as well as daisies, flourished in their season, among the uncut grass, and the white buttons of mushrooms showed themselves conspicuously among the seeded flowers and withered leaves of autumn.

The dairy and kitchen were by far the largest rooms in the farmhouse, so that Agneta felt justified in haunting them, even without the inducement of playing at making butter and cheese, and baking home-made bread, much as [Pg 162]Harry and Horry played at cutting down and gathering in sheaves, and driving home and stacking the corn. Agneta found another excuse in hopeless endeavours to sketch the great open chimney-place, and its clumsy oven piled round with billets of wood; or a section of the dark beams of the low roof which Harry’s middle-aged housekeeper had already hung again thickly, as of old, with red and white beef and bacon, brown nets full of pale green onions, and bunches of olive and sage-coloured pot-herbs; or the wooden trap stair which ascended to a room above, that Harry, like a true farmer, had immediately appropriated to himself because it lacked a partition on the kitchen side, and from the narrow elevated platform, looking down into the yawning gulf beneath, Harry was supposed to inspect and address his farm servants assembled of a morning, to give in their reports and receive his orders.

Of course there was no accommodation in [Pg 163]either of the two tiny parlours for morning callers, or dinner guests—who must have come to dine before they came to call, or so much as had lunch—a topsy-turvy reversal of all household arrangements hitherto known to Agneta, which fascinated her like every other unapprehended possibility of primitive housekeeping. As to an evening party, with hired music, dancing, ices and supper anywhere else save spread like a gipsy tea on the rough grass of the paddock, Agneta laughed the low tuneful laugh which was almost as purely gleeful as Harry’s, at the mere absurdity of the picture conjured up by the imagination.

But who wanted morning callers, or the wittiest diners-out, such as Agneta had heard her Aunt Julia talk of, or even the best waltzer in London—whom anybody could have, so soon as she was presented and came out—down here at Copley Grange Farm with the boys in their retreat? Harry hunted for hens’ and ducks’ [Pg 164]eggs with Agneta in the poultry and straw yards and by the pond, just as he had formerly hunted with her for blackbirds’ and chaffinches’ nests in the shrubberies at Thornley Lodge. He took her, too, every day to his stables and cowhouse, and he had promised she should milk a cow before she left. He let her accompany him and Horry when the weather was fine to the fields, and when it was bad to the barn, to watch the operations of the thrashing-mill and fanners. He had helped her to climb up once beside him, to a throne of sheaves in a corn-cart, and driven her in triumph into the yard, which Agneta held for the moment to be much better than occupying the box-seat on a drag, as most girls had an opportunity of doing on some occasion in their lives.

The next public appearance which Oliver made was in delivering a lecture on Wordsworth in the town-hall, which was readily lent to any respectable lecturer, native or foreign, who undertook to enlighten or please the townspeople. Courses of lectures were not uncommon in Friarton, though more frequently delivered in winter than at any other season, but no tradesman had ever before stood at the lecturer’s desk improvised for the occasion.

Oliver could bring himself to read a lecture as he could sing a song. He had read prize essays before an audience at once more [Pg 166]critical and a good deal more aggressive. Though Friarton did not form an exception to the great rule of a man’s not being a prophet in his own country, he was not likely to be bidden speak out and turn over his leaf by the most sarcastic of his fellow-citizens.

After much reflection, Oliver had come to the conclusion that a lecture from him might be useful and acceptable, and he had wished to give it at once that he might not interfere with the courses of lectures which Mr. Fremantle and others were wont to read to select circles, generally with some distinctly charitable or purely intellectual object in view, from November to February.

Besides, Oliver was reluctant to let the autumn pass without an attempt to rouse those of his neighbours with whom he had cast in his lot to take their share of the wealth which was free to them. After his experience at the annual excursion, and at the Friarton [Pg 167]floricultural and horticultural show, where it was evident so much energy was spent on raising Brobdingnag cabbages and roses, he suspected that the book of nature, with all its higher teaching, was closed to his class even beyond other classes. He wished to do what he could to show how much good as well as beauty existed in the world simply for the taking, and how deeply and vitally humanity was interested in the grand and terrible, and fair and sweet framework around it. The pleasant little episode of the discovery he had made in Miss Nancy Barr had influenced him to a certain extent, but there must have been another less purely public-spirited inducement muddling Oliver’s brains, or else, young man of dreams and aspirations as he was—and to such an individual it is hard to say what misconception is too grotesque and outrageous—he could not have gone so wide of the mark as to choose Wordsworth of all writers to fire [Pg 168]over the heads of his fellow-tradesmen. He might more judiciously have selected the most difficult question of the most difficult play of Shakespeare, the problem of the madness or non-madness of Hamlet, the theory of the morality of Timon of Athens, and offered it to those excellent people as a nut to crack. And Oliver ought to have known, and did know, in a form of knowledge undigested and unapplied—as it appeared in this instance—that while ballad literature is the first conscious intellectual effort of a people, in genuine old ballads the references to nature are few and simple. It is only when man is unconsciously in a state of nature, or when he is in an advanced stage of culture, that he looks into nature as into a mirror, and sees all humanity and the God of humanity reflected in it.

The truth was, Oliver happened to be a young man in more than in reforming zeal, and when he used Wordsworth as a weapon, he [Pg 169]had, whether he knew it or not, a private as well as a public end in his mind, for which he burned to employ the philosophy of the chief of the Lake school.

When Oliver offered himself as lecturer, he was well enough received. Mr. Fremantle and the rest of Oliver’s old patrons were positively gracious in volunteering their support. Possibly, the manner in which they had first taken up and then dropped their former protégé for his fidelity to trade, had left a little compunction in their minds which rendered them all the blander when an opportunity presented itself for patronising him again without compromising their own principles; though such jars occurred, as when Mr. Wright, intending to be complimentary, suggested that Oliver might lecture in his university hood and gown, to which the future lecturer answered bluntly, he saw no good in that, he would as soon show himself in a cap and apron.

[Pg 170]

The tradespeople, for once, were not offended that one of themselves should do something which all the others could not do, and which they were, therefore, generally pleased to taboo as out of their way. Happily, they regarded Oliver’s purpose as a vindication of their right to do as their customers did, to be as good as they were, nay, a deal better. Because they were the great shopkeeping class with its distinguishing virtues. The tradespeople were at once the thews and sinews and the salt of the nation. They supplied alike its necessaries and luxuries. There was ten times more capital spread over their tills and banking accounts than was to be found in the pockets and cheque-books of their professional brethren.

The shopkeepers were the pillars of the pure dissenting churches. It was largely by the votes of the lower middle-class that members got into Parliament, so that it was by the shopkeepers—as they were tempted to boast, [Pg 171]without any idea of being profane—that ‘Kings reigned, and princes dispensed justice.’ The shopkeeping ranks of England, with their vigour, their substance, their stake in the prosperity of the country, their stolid but supreme self-assertion, far excelled in power (let the world be thankful) the brute force of the great unwashed.

The tradespeople of Friarton accepted Oliver as their champion for the time being, and prepared to go en masse to hear him, in order to show he was their lecturer. He was not to have a mere handful of an audience, not even of the out-and-out gentry, but of the shabby-genteel, such as Mr. Fremantle was content to address. Oliver was to air his abilities and their college training, demonstrating that he was as far before a schoolmaster-parson like Fremantle in profane scholarship, as the shopkeepers’ pastor, Mr. Holland, was in advance of the clerk in holy orders in spiritual gifts.

[Pg 172]

Old Dadd proved nearly the solitary defaulter. ‘I make a point, Mr. Oliver, of attending no lectures save those in the chapel on Sunday evenings,’ he explained. ‘Yes, yes, I understand you perfectly, sir, that you are to speak after shop hours, but that is the very time when I compare my invoices, make myself acquainted with the prices and read anything else I care to see in the papers. Lectures ain’t in my line, and I am too old a boy to take up with new courses, I leave ’em to the young people. Mrs. Dadd—not that she is so much younger, as, like the rest of the ladies, she would have us believe—and my son Jack will represent the family for its credit and yours.’

‘If you care to see me, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Dadd, with her propensity to make herself scarce.

‘Of course he does,’ interrupted Jack; ‘even an old woman counts. You can thump with [Pg 173]your umbrellar at the applause. Trust us for crying you up to the skies, Constable,’ was the cheerful assurance of Jack, who had never heard the verb claquer, or guessed its effect in metropolitan theatres.

‘If you’ll listen to me—that is all I want,’ said Oliver.

‘Oh! if it’s the independent dodge, and standing on your own merits, you’re after, we can be as quiet as mice,’ said Jack, a little offended at the indifferent reception of his pledge.

‘My dear, we are the most highly favoured of mortals,’ Mrs. Hilliard told Catherine at dinner.

‘Are we?’ asked Catherine, sceptically, looking at the partridge on her plate, as if she lamented its early, piteous fate, and did not know how to eat it.

‘My great-cousin Oliver—his surname should have been Cromwell, not Constable—will deign [Pg 174]to hold forth for our benefit in the town-hall on Tuesday evening.’

‘What about?’ enquired Catherine without much interest, still picking at her partridge as if she saw it flying over the stubble.

‘How should I know? On the duty of girls taking bread-sauce and pegging—not picking—at the food on their plates. I don’t know what will become of you, child; you despise bread-sauce, you are too fine for mint-sauce, and as for onion-sauce—to which I am base enough to incline, though I do it in strict privacy, as you will bear me witness, and avoid all respectable company for the rest of the day—I wonder you can sit in the same room with it and me.’

‘I am not fine,’ denied Catherine; then, returning to the charge with a gleam of animation, ‘I should like to know what Oliver Constable is going to lecture upon.’

‘I should say on the model trader, whose [Pg 175]biography has been so often written; the poor boy who finds a rusty horse-shoe, sells it for old iron, and dies the possessor of the most perfect racing stud in the kingdom.’

‘That would not suit his views,’ objected Catherine.

‘I dare say I have spoilt the example,’ said Mrs. Hilliard innocently; ‘and when one thinks of it, Oliver would have the boy gathering horse-shoes till he was grey-headed, though in the interval he should find time and opportunity to learn to read, clean himself, and use a knife and fork. Of course he must take to moralising on the first artificer in brass and iron, and find illustrations of the work of his successors in the sword, the plough, and the pen—steel pens would come in so nicely to finish the peroration. I should not be surprised, after all, if the lecturer were to let the model trader alone—I am sure he deserves a little rest—and give us the natural history of a bit of bread, [Pg 176]beginning with seed corn, and ending with—it ought not to be a slice of loaf, a macaroon is a much higher and more artistic product of the oven,’ said Mrs. Hilliard gravely, while she inspected carefully through her eye-glass a plate of macaroons on the sideboard. ‘It will be a revelation to Fan, who is said to live under the impression that loaves grow somewhere, out of sight, behind the shop, doubtless, as the bread-fruit tree flourishes in the South Sea Islands. You know she is too good a Christian to fail to be aware that manna only fell from the skies for a time, to the Jews, when Moses was leading them through the wilderness.’

‘I don’t need such enlightenment, and I shall not go,’ said Catherine.

‘What, not to hear Oliver exalt his vocation, and establish satisfactorily that, without bread, we should all be cannibals again soon, I suppose; for what with pleuro-pneumonia and [Pg 177]rinderpest, there would not be nearly enough animals left for us, and of those which were left, we could not depend upon their wholesomeness and appetising attractions. I should not like to try dogs and rats and mice—not if I went to China to acquire the proper taste.’

‘I don’t care for exaggeration,’ said Catherine, with her customary candour.

‘Neither in sense, nor in nonsense, which means neither in the master baker, nor in me. Well, I did hear Oliver was going to be quite commonplace, and serve up some poet.’

‘Which?’ enquired Catherine, with more curiosity than she had yet displayed.

‘Wordsworth. He is going to let us see what a primrose is when it is more than a yellow primrose by the river’s brim and at the cottage door, when it is in a spring bonnet. Why did Wordsworth not give the last important position? It must have existed in his [Pg 178]day, though crewel work had not yet been revived. At present, I am certain our principal considerations in reference to primroses, are how they will look on the borders of table-covers, or on the pockets and bibs of aprons.’

‘Speak for yourself, Louisa,’ said Catherine, roused to indignation as her cousin had meant her to be. ‘Some of us have still the grace to think of primroses wet with dew, beneath green hedgerows, under April skies. But I wish he had not chosen Wordsworth; I think he is a mistake.’

‘The greatest mistake possible, my dear.’ Mrs. Hilliard confirmed the opinion with alacrity. ‘Quite an anachronism. He ought to have been a typical burgher, like those Flemish cloth-workers in the middle ages.’

Catherine stared for a second with wide-open blue eyes. ‘Oh!’ she drew a long breath; ‘I did not mean Oliver Constable, I [Pg 179]was speaking of Wordsworth. Of course he wrote some very beautiful things,’ she continued gravely. ‘Surely his greatest opponent would not willingly lose his ’Ode to Immortality.’

‘I cannot dignify myself by calling myself a poet’s greatest opponent, I am such a mere mortal. And I confess I never read the ode; the less loss to me, that I am sure I should not understand a word of it,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, with undisturbed complacency, as she helped herself to grapes.

Catherine was not listening. She was getting more and more into the habit of not attending to a great deal of the conversation around her, and looking as if she were speaking to invisible hearers. ‘I could never speak of Wordsworth as Macaulay and Madame Bunsen wrote,’ she went on in answer to her own thoughts, as if they had been audible remarks. ‘Indeed, I cannot forgive them for it.’

[Pg 180]

‘Catherine, have you forgotten your catechism?’ remonstrated Mrs. Hilliard; ‘and I dare say poor Macaulay and Madame Bunsen did not understand Wordsworth any more than I should have done.’

Catherine paid no heed to the interruption, and showed that spoken soliloquy is still natural to some people. ‘Yet I believe there is a great deal of truth in the criticism that Wordsworth sacrificed his powers to an intellectual hobby, and brought down poetry to tedious, if rather fine prose, by insisting on idealising the tritest, most wretchedly dull subjects, though I suppose he would have said nothing is either trite or dull when rightly looked at. Upon the whole I prefer Crabbe. There was method in his madness. He was more dramatic, if he idealised less.’

‘I wish there was method in your madness, and that you idealised less. Do you hear, Catherine? Will you have grapes?’

[Pg 181]

‘Yes, thanks. I am going to take back my word, Louisa; I should like to hear Oliver Constable’s lecture.’

‘Of course you would. All the world, including the great shopkeepers, will be there. I, for one, would not miss the lecture on any account, though I expect no more edification than I shall get from observing Mrs. Fremantle looking suavely over the heads of the Polleys and Dadds, while every rustle of Mrs. Polley’s Sunday gown will deliver the challenge, “I pay my way. I have as good a right to be here as any of you. I can do without your custom if you like to take it away; my word! you will miss me more than I shall miss you. Besides, Oliver Constable is our man.” I say, Catherine, it cannot be that Oliver Constable is flirting with one of those Polley girls? People say so, you know. Now, I can stand a good deal, but one must stop somewhere, and I really could not swallow that. The Constables are my own [Pg 182]relations, and Oliver and Fan have been educated like other people. Though they are eccentric, they are presentable, and don’t take advantage of kinship. But imagine what it would be to have Mrs. Polley claiming me for a family connection, when, of course, I should have to admit the claim, while her daughter addressed me as ‘cousin’. That would try my liberal-mindedness.’

Catherine showed herself a little startled when this suggestion was deliberately made to her, but she looked it steadily in the face. ‘Why not,’ she asked quietly a moment afterwards, ‘if the couple suit each other? Oliver Constable must know, so far as it refers to himself. Perhaps the Polleys are not so much worse than other girls.’

In making the last despondent reflection, she was influenced by the recollection of nieces of Mrs. Wright’s, whom Catherine Hilliard had encountered lately, and whom she [Pg 183]was accustomed to style to herself ‘low-minded girls,’ after she found that they divided their time pretty equally between dressing, taking their meals, and playing lawn-tennis. ‘Are you liberal-minded, Louisa?’ Catherine began to speculate next.

‘Don’t cross-question me,’ cried Mrs. Hilliard; ‘I won’t have one of my own dining-room chairs converted into a witness-box. There are liberal-mindedness and liberal-mindedness. The French, the wittiest nation in Europe, invented that splendid definition. I am ready to depose solemnly that I never professed to be a chartist or a communist or a red republican—nothing of the kind. I only call myself a friendly easy-going sort of woman, who would not condescend to turn her back on her kindred, and who could not do without her neighbours to laugh with and laugh at. Therefore she was not disposed to weed out her visiting list at Friarton to a few straggling [Pg 184]aspirants to gentility. But if Oliver Constable commit a marriage with one of the Miss Polleys, I shall turn my coat and become as exclusive as Mrs. Wright. Her father was actually a fashionable London physician, who drove about in a pill-box and attended peers and aldermen for their gout and fine ladies and citizenesses for their nerves. Think how his daughter has to condescend to us country clodhoppers! By the way, I may as well turn my coat as you take back your word. I am glad, my love, that you do anything so nineteenth century and fallible—so unlike a vestal virgin or a précieuse ridicule.’

Oliver was taking one step to which Fan had no objection.

Harry Stanhope, with a curious echo of old and young Dadd, told Oliver: ‘I say, old man, lectures ain’t in my way, as you know, but I’ll see you through yours.’ Agneta also expressed her full intention of being present. But as it [Pg 185]happened, when the evening came, no Stanhope put in an appearance. They had been decoyed away by some prospect of greater entertainment elsewhere. Agneta admitted afterwards that she had left the schoolroom too lately to relish lectures, any more than Harry cared for them.

But in spite of the Stanhopes’ desertion, if Oliver’s sole or even principal intention had been to bring together the upper and lower middle classes of Friarton, and unite them superficially, by a common bond of interest for one evening, he might have been satisfied. But unfortunately, his aspirations went far beyond these modest results.

The lecturer began stiffly with involuntary bodily contortions which monopolised much of the attention, and were fruitful in small titters and grins from the ’Mily Polleys and Jack Dadds among the audience. Mrs. Hilliard neither tittered nor grinned. She looked preternaturally [Pg 186]sedate, but her grey eyes danced under the great flat expanse of her forehead.

Catherine Hilliard leant back in her chair perfectly unstirred to mirth. Her hands were loosely clasped in her lap. A shade of expectation kindled a little light in the face, which under its warmly tinted hair looked like

walking in the night, or a flower blossoming in the shade. Yet Catherine was not without a perception of comedy. She could laugh when she could find anything laughable to her; the misfortune was, this occurred seldom. For her sense of the ridiculous had not, by any means, outgrown and dwarfed all her other faculties—a result which may be found not only in old court fools and in many of the village imbeciles of every generation, but also in a large number of men and women who have special pretensions to wisdom and wit.

[Pg 187]

When Oliver warmed with his subject, his gestures grew less and less awkward, the tendency to grimace disappeared, and something of the natural dignity of the man shone forth from his goodly physique.

But alas! his audience did not warm with him, though the want of sympathy, while it went to his heart, had not the power to damp his enthusiasm so as to rob him of the advantage he derived from it. As Oliver discoursed on the nobility and beauty which underlie all God’s creation and are never utterly absent, however foully or meanly marred in his fearful and wonderful handiwork man; as he bade his listeners recognise the high heroism of a rude old Westmoreland shepherd; the essential refinement of a bareheaded, barefooted, Highland girl; as he urged them to examine and ascertain for themselves the exquisite perfection of much they might be tempted to overlook, or undervalue [Pg 188]as trifles light as air, or as possessions too universal to be of the slightest value, gaping impatience and scorn took the place of titters and grins, with few exceptions.

‘Did you ever hear such radical rant—praising them pedlars and leech gatherers and the whole band of wandering vagabonds?’ Mrs. Polley was moved to whisper to the daughter next her, during a pause in the selection of some of the quotations with which the lecture was graced. ‘I would not buy a reel of cotton from the one, or trust a silver spoon within a mile of t’other of them tramps. I would never have evened Oliver Constable to be guilty of this. I declare I begin to be frightened of this here young man. Mark my words, Ann, he’ll not stop where he has begun. It is fair impudence to deliver such a lecture to well-to-do, respectable people. As for his trash about birds’ eggs and daisies, why it is fit only for a parcel of children! He’ll be proposing Polley [Pg 189]and me to go a bird-nesting and threading of daisy-chains next.’

‘I would not say it to everybody, because Constable is a personal friend,’ said Jack Dadd with ostentatious loyalty, ‘but I must say I prefer a lecture in the chapel from the Dutchman when he’s sending us all to pot. We mayn’t take the whole in, and it ain’t agreeable—exactly, to be called bad names, though it’s what we bargain for from a parson, but when he comes it strong and hot it is more rousing. If this is what you call poetry, ’Liza, you and Constable may keep it to yourselves and welcome.’

‘But this ain’t what I call poetry,’ protested ’Liza, doubly wounded; ‘I never read anything like it. No poetry I ever heard of, or cared for, could be about common old women and idiot boys. I have read about outlaws and brigands, but they are out of the common as well as knights and troubadours; I must say [Pg 190]for myself, I always preferred lords and ladies. As for lovers—and everybody knows most poetry is on the tender passion—’ simpered ’Liza, ‘who would stop to hear how an old married couple—like father and mother for instance, only a great deal worse when you come to low clanjamphrey of weavers and shepherds, get on or fall out? They are married for better, for worse, and must pull together, and there’s an end of them.’

‘Don’t object to father just now,’ said ’Mily, ‘for if he had not fallen asleep—small blame to him—and snored so that I had to stuff my handkerchief into my mouth to keep myself from laughing right out every time he struck in, I should either have fallen asleep myself, or I could not have sat to the end of the drone. Call this cleverness and the good of a university education! Then I am glad I ain’t clever in the same way and that I have not even been away at a boarding-school, though I used to [Pg 191]tease mother to send me from home—just for the name of the thing. I should have hated the learning and snapped my fingers in the schoolmistress’s face, I dare say, before I was done.’

These open objections were the echo of the prevailing sentiments of a large proportion of the audience. With regard to another section there was decorous respect for Wordsworth. Public opinion has changed since the criticism in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ was penned. Mrs. Hilliard was singular in her freedom of speech—most people pretended or tried hard to admire the poet, at least, while they strangled their tell-tale yawns and came to the conclusion that Oliver Constable was casting pearls before swine, the swine being the herd of tradespeople. Such hearers sat through Oliver’s lecture with a commendable appearance of attention. They knew what was due both to him and themselves, not to say to Wordsworth, in their relative [Pg 192]positions. Only a fine sprinkling of choice sympathisers—turning up sometimes, like Miss Nancy Barr, when least expected—responded to the lecturer with all their hearts.

But Catherine Hilliard was not in the last slender detachment any more than in the others. She did not go with the multitude. Neither could she be converted in an hour, though she realised that Oliver woke up to his office, burst some of his bonds, and ended by lecturing and speaking well. Certainly her lips fell a little apart in wistful appreciation, and delicate light and colour came into the subdued pallor of her face when he quoted

and called the daisy

but she lacked full humanity, and could not follow him in his fellow-feeling with Betty Foy and Peter Bell. She still thought Wordsworth [Pg 193]had made a huge mistake in his vocation, and that Oliver Constable had capped him with a blunder as gross. Even if he would choose Wordsworth, why did he not read from ‘The Horn of Egremont Castle,’ or ‘The White Doe of Rylstone,’ as more fit for a popular assembly than the ‘Ode to Immortality’ could be? No; Macaulay might be deplorably intolerant in recording—were it for his private satisfaction—the judgment he had formed, and Madame Bunsen might be singularly inappreciative where such a woman was concerned, but there was ground for their censure though none for their contempt. And Oliver Constable would have done far better to have selected one of the ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’—even with its classic story and unfamiliar names—for Friarton ears.

Oliver Constable, watching the young aristocratic beauty Agneta Stanhope masquerading with her brothers, thought of Marie Antoinette essaying a Dresden china shepherdess’s life at Little Trianon. He judged that Marie Thérèse’s high-spirited, frolicsome daughter, whose fair-haired beauty, in its flower, was not without its buxomness, princess and queen though she was, had less refined traits, so far as he could make out from her early pictures, till terrible misfortune lent the face tragic majesty, than were to be found in the pale, delicately cut little features of this simply well-born English [Pg 195]girl who had been brought up in the calculated shade, seclusion, and exclusivism, of an aristocratic schoolroom, with only a formal walk, or ride or drive for exercise, while she had remained totally uninitiated in the swimming, rowing, and skating exercises which are beginning at last to be allowed to diversify more elderly forms of ‘constitutionals’ for the girls of the upper ten thousand. Agneta’s lawn games even had been generally affairs of two, with one of the two what Harry would have called ‘a confirmed duffer and fogy,’ while the girl’s early romps with her schoolboy brothers had been few and far between.

Agneta Stanhope was in perfect health of body and mind, yet she appeared at Copley Grange Farm like a hothouse flower which had never been exposed to sun or wind, while welcoming them with such a sweet exultant wooing of their tanning, hardening influences, as added to the grace of her ignorance and helplessness—such [Pg 196]ignorance and helplessness as charm in a gentle young foreigner who is all frankness and guilelessness, and willingly makes herself at home in a hitherto unexplored region, of which the rude simplicity alone is perceptible to her. In such a rôle Agneta Stanhope was still more engaging and interesting than beautiful. Indeed her greatest claim to beauty lay in the air of exquisite tender fragility—which had to do with her rearing, but not with her character, not even with her constitution, in spite of her slight figure, which, however, was elastic and wiry enough—and the sky-blueness of her eyes—like Harry’s, very unlike Catherine Hilliard’s—set in a miniature face, the colour of which inclined to that of a lily rather than of a rose, when she came first, though a single week’s life with her brothers brought into the soft cheeks a tinge of the red which qualifies the whiteness of apple-blossom.

It was really in all respects as if Agneta [Pg 197]Stanhope were visiting her brothers in one of the distant colonies to which they had been originally destined, though she was not reduced to washing her clothes or baking her bread; certainly she would not have objected to these sports in her ignorance of what they led to. On the one hand, she was childishly ignorant, a creature who had never stood alone or thought for herself, or been conscious of a single responsibility to her fellow-creatures since she was born, while—like Catherine Hilliard here—neither had she been of vital consequence to anybody, or been cherished and petted, as might well have been the lot of such a girl in different circumstances. She had suffered a curiously crippling experience of life on two sides of her nature. On another, she was precocious, and early instructed in obligations, necessities, and experiences; but this element in her education and second nature was not on the surface or readily perceived.

[Pg 198]

Agneta was not likely, even if fortune in the person of her Aunt Julia favoured her present wishes, to stay long enough at Copley Grange Farm for yeoman life to pall upon her. And when she was wearied in the least, she took refuge—the power of changing her place when and how she liked was another allurement to her—with her own and her brothers’ friends at Friarton Mill. Agneta could not draw the nice lines of distinction which were so skilfully defined by the magnates of Friarton. She was blind enough in her youthful obtuseness not to see magnates in the town. What was the great difference between the master of a grammar school who taught Latin or mathematics, the doctor who felt pulses, the old established family solicitor and banker who drew out wills and leases and counted sovereigns, even the vicar, who wrote sermons and took a class in the Sunday-school, and Oliver Constable, who ruled over working-men indeed, [Pg 199]instead of boys, clerks, and curates, but who had been at Oxford with her brothers and who lived in such a perfect old place as Friarton Mill?

In what respect was Oliver Constable’s sister, who had been educated in good schools at home and abroad, very inferior to the other ladies in the neighbourhood, whom, in her heart of hearts, Agneta Stanhope appearing so humble in that innocent youth—of which at the same time arrogance is perhaps the commoner immature accompaniment—never dreamt of reckoning her own equals?

Agneta was actually disposed to put more weight on the line of yeomen, from which the Constables had sprung, than on the fashionable London doctor, who was the father of one of the master’s wives, or on the gallant major in the line from whom another lady claimed descent.

[Pg 200]

Agneta showed herself extremely perverse where the best houses in Friarton were concerned. To her there was no particular goodness about them; and they had not the glamour of the farm and mill-houses. The Friarton drawing-rooms, from Mrs. Hilliard’s downwards, were only more or less sorry reflections of the drawing-room at home, they were not at all like the delicious little parlours—all chimney-corners and cupboards, at Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill.

Agneta was just a trifle haughty and reserved when Harry took her among the professional people in Friarton, and all the time she was as gay as a lark, and as playful as a kitten, at Friarton Mill. She did not emulate Harry in winning every heart. She piqued the Friarton ladies by her neglect and incapacity for measuring their titles to respect. Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin Catherine formed the only exceptions. Mrs. Hilliard laughed at Agneta’s preferences, [Pg 201]and Catherine simply held Agneta as a big baby fit to rank with the overgrown school boy her brother.

Truth to tell, Agneta Stanhope, who was assured of her position, while she did not approve from principle and instinct of debatable middle ground, still never so much as imagined that she could compromise herself by temporary association with people like the Wrights and Fremantles. It was as a pure matter of taste that she chose to disport herself among pronounced yeomen and tradespeople, whose habits and tastes, from an accident of education and a piquancy of flavour, were the opposite of oppressive to her.

Fan Constable repaid Harry Stanhope’s confidence. She was very good to Agneta, devoting herself to the girl’s gratification with an abstract devotion—disinterested, guiltless of ulterior motives, peculiar to the young woman. It was no matter that Agneta’s pleasures, when [Pg 202]they took the form of seeking for hens’ nests, and carrying the eggs home in the skirt of her gown, or wishing to milk cows, were not only startling but wholly antagonistic to Fan’s frame of mind and sense of fitness. It was rather the old story of the roc’s egg which Fan would have got at any price for her visitor. Fan in her solemn earnestness and absolute matter-of-factness, masqueraded too to please Agneta, played at the ideal miller’s daughter for whom the real miller’s daughter had been wont to entertain a great contempt, dawdling among the sedges by Buller’s Brook, sitting among the sacks in the mill gallery, munching groats with her white teeth, roasting them in the kiln, having herself weighed in the scales. And when Agneta requested, with fearless directness and insistance, to be taken to Friarton to see what she called ‘the ancestral shop,’ and be shown all over the premises in order to have the complicated processes of [Pg 203]making bread rendered clear to her understanding, Fan went with the young lady without a demur. It was on this occasion that Fan heard Agneta beg for an unbaked cake, and pray that Oliver would carve her initials with his penknife on the soft crust, as if it were the bark of a tree, and he were another Orlando to her Rosalind, and then entreat that she might put it with her own hand into the oven, concluding by calling everybody to promise faithfully that when it came out, her cake should be duly forwarded with the rest of the bread to Copley Grange Farm.

Fan witnessed the ridiculous performance without more than a fleeting pang. And if Agneta Stanhope had further taken it into her head—full of fantastic whims—during the intoxication of these weeks which formed her first holidays, that she and Fan should fill baskets with floury loaves and carry them with their own hands to feed the poor, there would have been [Pg 204]some danger of Fan’s complying with the absurd suggestion, in the height of her infatuation to please Harry Stanhope’s sister.

Shrewd as Fan was, she became thoroughly taken in by the stranger. Fan learnt to believe in Agneta, and there was relief and joy in the belief, as entirely as Fan believed, with more reason where single-heartedness was concerned, in Harry.

After all, Agneta, though she was fond of Fan, liked Oliver still better. He was neither her victim nor her slave, though he could not help admiring what was admirable in her high breeding, and natural sweetness and affectionateness, and being tolerant and kind to her. He was not a son of the soil, neither had he been brought up in such total unfamiliarity with girls of Agneta Stanhope’s stamp that he should fall down and worship her, caught chiefly by the charm of her conventional grace and refinement in their contrast with the conventional [Pg 205]uncouthness and vulgarity of the girls he had previously known.

To Oliver Constable’s mind there was a considerable amount of snobbery and caddishness—an absolute disloyalty to all which lies below the immediate surface—in this ready subserviency of the self-made man to the material advantages of the first conventional lady with whom he comes in close contact. And as fine feathers did not necessarily make fine birds to Oliver, he had been tempted to feel a grim satisfaction when he read of such men’s being played with and fooled by exquisite triflers who had subdued their captives, almost without an effort, by trifles light as air. ‘Serve the duffers right,’ Oliver had growled. He had imagined that if he were to love a woman with his whole heart and soul, it would be the woman independent of the attributes of any station, the noble woman, who, if she were technically as well as ideally a lady, would be [Pg 206]as indifferent to mere technicalities, perhaps as weary of them, as Catherine Hilliard often looked.

Oliver Constable stood in no danger of being bound in thrall by Agneta Stanhope, and his insensibility formed another racy distinction in her eyes. No doubt in her cloistered schoolroom days, she had not yet begun her career of conquest. But she had moved in circles where it is the business of many men’s lives to please women, where it becomes a trick of habit which keeps the hand in play, even when it is not pursued for the sake of any individual woman. She had been accustomed, during her passing glimpses of the world she was to live in, to be outwardly deferred to, flattered and complimented. Now Mr. Constable, while she was sure he was incapable of being anything save chivalrously good to any woman, did not flatter her a bit. He had a strong propensity to speak the truth always. Sometimes he forgot himself [Pg 207]so far as to take her off almost as he took off his sister, or, worse still, to lose sight of her existence for the moment, as he lost sight of Fan’s. Withal, in spite of the brotherly obliviousness, and the difference of opinion on many points between Oliver and Fan, Agneta could not fail to see that in the middle of his dry jokes and bitter enough sarcasms, Oliver Constable regarded his sister far more as his equal than Harry regarded his sister whom he habitually petted. Mr. Constable consulted Miss Constable seriously, even when he did not take her advice. But Harry, though he was sufficiently interested to notice Agneta’s mode of doing her hair, her changes of dress, her adopted occupations, and would even, as she was gratefully persuaded few brothers would, put himself about to contribute to her occupations and render them agreeable, never talked to her even as he talked to Horry, never made her the confidante of his schemes and plans, [Pg 208]never asked her opinion on any subject of more consequence than a neck-tie or the cutting of his hair. Harry would never think of behaving in any other manner to a girl like Agneta.

Agneta Stanhope was not a born coquette, but she had been taught to estimate at their proper value all her advantages, whether natural or acquired. She was well aware, in this her girlhood, that they were the weapons with which she was to cut her way to fortune—the only fortune which could possibly await a well-born, fairly attractive girl of her rank, who had no portion beyond what served for her slender allowance of pocket-money, though she had influential friends, who could at least lead her into the arena where she was to secure a creditable establishment, or prove a failure and remain a poor relation to the end of her days. There was an obligation on Agneta’s part, to herself as well as to her kindred, for the future in addition to the present, to be agreeable, to [Pg 209]charm men—that she might grow skilful in the art of war, that she might not only smite down one antagonist, but overthrow the foe by sixes and tens, so as to have several suitors to pick and choose from, with the greater chance of escaping the collapse of a mauvais parti for a husband.

Certainly, the prevailing burden of her first, and all her succeeding unmarried seasons, still sat lightly on Agneta Stanhope, yet she was not without a latent, pervading sense of it, which caused her, in very sport, to polish and poise her spear, and essay it against any natural enemy, let him be ever so far beyond the pale of her claims and requirements.

Thus, Agneta, out of a kind of womanly instinct, though one not known to the higher order of women, set herself, with her eyes open, to please Oliver Constable, to beguile him into making it his main object to please her, and into sliding imperceptibly into platonically [Pg 210]romantic and tender relations with her. Undoubtedly, Agneta was not so well acquainted with human nature as to anticipate any danger of scorching her own wings in the process of consuming the heart of another, far less to measure the degree of injury and suffering which might be involved in that same casual scorching of her fairy queen and butterfly attributes. But though she had been wise beyond her years and before her time, such wisdom would not have sufficed to arrest her in her course. Her latent high spirits, which became her antecedents, had survived her lifetime of discipline.

In the dire necessity of subjugating men till they became her open or secret lovers, she would have said, laughing with good-natured mockery, at the most distant suspicion of such a peril, ‘if my wings are to be scorched, let them. I shall survive to flutter them as bravely as ever, till they are confined by a marriage [Pg 211]ring. I must have Mr. Constable think me nice—the nicest girl he has ever known.’

When Agneta Stanhope turned back her hair, or made it into a silken fringe for Oliver, as Alice Grey braided her hair for another; when Agneta set her gipsy hat in the most bewitching fashion at Oliver, and gathered blackberries in the company of the miller of Friarton Mill and his sister, the blackberries not being by any means Agneta’s chief object; when she turned a demure little dissenter, in the teeth of Fan Constable’s being a loyal churchwoman in right of the Constables’ mother, the curate’s daughter, and drew away the said churchwoman, to the great edification of Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley, to evening attendance at the chapel favoured by the shopkeepers, where Oliver continued to worship as his fathers had worshipped before him; when Agneta sang her ballads, which, like homely Christian names, had begun to reappear in her [Pg 212]set in proportion as they had died out in lower circles, her ‘Sweet Homes,’ and ‘Maids of Allanwater,’—the maid having been a miller’s daughter, let us observe in passing—her ‘Brooks’ and ‘Rosebuds,’ and told her naïve stories of the mild maidenly adventures she and Miss Dennison had met with in their quiet life, to Oliver, he showed no sign of perceiving her delicate manœuvres. He offered only a passive resistance. He stood like a rock assailed by summer waves rippling back from it with an incessant murmur, or like a giant Gulliver submitting with a patient, hardly perceptible shrug of his shoulders, awkward man as he was in his invulnerability, because he could not avoid the assault, to the airy overtures of a fair Lilliputian, who, reaching up on tiptoe, did not attain to the height of his knee.

Harry Stanhope opened his eyes wide, and laughed aloud at the fine, and, of course, perfectly decorous little farce. ‘What a desperate [Pg 213]flirt that monkey Aggie is going to prove, to be sure,’ he remarked to his gossip Horace; ‘barely out of the nursery, yet ready to fly at game like Constable! What would the child do with him if she did succeed in bringing him down? He would cumber her bag at starting, with a vengeance. Not Aunt Julia’s game, eh, Horry? But the old man can take care of himself, though he is as much in earnest in his way as his sister is in hers, and would be fit to do something outrageous if he were winged. The chit knows what she is about also, and, as no harm can come of it, she may be left to amuse herself, after the fashion of her kind.’

If Harry had not given carte blanche Horry might have called it a positive disgrace for Aggie to attempt a flirtation with a man in Constable’s position, forgetting for the moment that he and Harry had elected to be yeomen, and that Agneta could therefore be viewed as the sister of two yeomen. But [Pg 214]the oracle had spoken, and silenced any voice Horry might have exercised in the matter.

It was sensible, severe Fan Constable who looked on at the play which sometimes provoked, and sometimes amused Oliver—for he was a young man and so susceptible to various influences—with glistening eyes and a throbbing heart. Was there more than one, true aristocrat, forgetful, not simply of self, but of the world? Might the friendship between Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill be cemented by a double alliance?

Fan was the last girl in the world to stoop, even for the purpose of conquering. If she did not receive allegiance unsought, she would never, by premeditation and with design, seek it. But she could find no condemnation for the doings of her new friend. All Fan’s blame was for Oliver, who continued, or pretended to continue, utterly insensible to the wonderful irresistible honour conferred upon him. Fan [Pg 215]discovered springs of sympathy with Agneta, while she had no patience with Oliver. She was impelled to say something to him one evening when brother and sister had just parted from the Stanhopes and seen them go on their way through Copley Grange Park to the Farm. The group lingered on the road, in order to go up close to the half-shut-up house, examine the objectionable façade, and stand—figures in keeping—in the portico, while they ascertained for themselves how Friarton Mill looked from the great house in whose prospect it was understood to form such an ornament. The two Constables, on their part, stood on their own side of the Brook in the mill-house court.

‘I am not fond of gushing, I believe,’ said Fan, slowly and deliberately, as if she were making a searching analysis of her private propensities. ‘As a rule, I am convinced I am not fond of superlatives or caressing expressions’—speaking with studied moderation—‘but [Pg 216]I will say’—becoming ardent at a bound—‘Miss Stanhope, Agneta—I may call her behind her back as well as before her face, since she has asked me to call her by her Christian name,’ proclaimed Fan, with honest, affectionate pride in the permission—‘is the most lovable, darling girl I ever met.’

‘She is not a bad specimen of her class, I dare say,’ said Oliver with provoking impartiality.

‘Oh! Oliver,’ protested Fan, hot and indignant as at an unfeeling slight to her idol, ‘I am sure her testimony to your merits would be very different, and—and much warmer. She thinks so much of your good opinion, too. Oh! Oliver, I am tempted to think you without eyes, or ears, or heart, and you a young man seeing nobody—here, at least—who is fit to be mentioned in the same breath with Agneta Stanhope, while it will be your own fault if——’ Fan stopped in time, she was the last [Pg 217]woman to betray what looked to her upright, unsophisticated eyes, another woman’s weakness, however transparently that woman might herself reveal it. Fan had also become aware, in the case of the Polley girls, who, whatever their offences, had not lost their claim to modest womanhood, that she could not go nearer to mortally offending her brother than to hint at an unsolicited preference for him.

Even at the mere implication he grew red again with a manly, modest man’s shame, mingled now with a strong dash of impatience and scorn. ‘You are grossly mistaken, Fan,’ he said, in the first impulse of anger; then he recovered himself and went on with a laugh not altogether forced, ‘Miss Stanhope (Oliver no more called her Agneta behind her back than to her face) is a little goose—save her young ladyship’s pretensions; but you are a greater fool than I took you for, Fannikin, if you imagine for a moment that she is sincere in [Pg 218]more than in making the most of her holiday rustication—this is life in villeggiatura to her—and in compelling us all to like her. She and Harry are extravagantly fond of being liked. I am afraid it don’t answer in his case, but in hers it will cause her to be a very popular great lady some day, I have no question. She has exceedingly pretty, gracious, high-bred ways—you hear I grant they are pretty, the prettier that they are second nature rather than affectation. But she is also as thorough a woman of the world as if she were ten—twenty years older, ready to counsel her daughter as Tennyson’s aristocratic matron instructed her child.’

Fan was utterly incredulous and gravely offended. She would not give up Agneta Stanhope’s looking upon Fan and her brother as perfect equals, even if she were not suffered to add that, so far as Agneta’s personal choice went, she would not have objected to casting in her lot with them.

[Pg 219]

Fan was only a little staggered by some words which Harry let fall when he came over unexpectedly one morning to offer his sister’s excuses for having been hurried away sooner than she had counted on from the Farm, without being able to bid good-bye to Miss Constable. For, in truth, like the sweet, graceful vision that she had flashed upon them, Agneta Stanhope vanished in a moment, vision-like, out of the Constables’ sphere.

‘Aunt Julia found out that she could send old Jennings and meet Aggie in time for them to join her and the General at Crewe station and go on with them to Blackcombe, where the Herveys are to have some special affair for Dolph’s coming of age. They are old friends and connections of ours, you know, so it don’t matter that Aggie should be out at their ball before she has regularly come out of her shell. Ungrateful little wretch!—she professed to be bitten with our farm life, but [Pg 220]wasn’t she quickly cured when she heard what was in store for her? All the same,’ Harry corrected himself, remembering to whom he was speaking, and prompted by his natural kindly feeling, ‘she was very sorry that she could not get over to see and thank you.’

Still in the face of this shock, which Oliver was too magnanimous to enlarge upon, Fan clung to her faith in Agneta’s eternal friendship—nay, sisterly affection. Fan was only confirmed in her tenacious belief by getting an inkling of the fact that not only Mrs. Hilliard, but all Friarton, not possessing a grain of Oliver’s tender consideration and unbounded generosity, were laughing at the end of the temporary alliance between the girls with more exuberant mirth than charitable sympathy.

There was one man of Friarton descent whose distinguished fortunes occurred not once only to Fan Constable’s mind as presenting a marked contrast to her brother’s perverse crotchet of self-destruction, where his social position and even his material prosperity were concerned. For any tyro might crave leave to doubt whether Oliver Constable would increase or even retain the amount of fortune which his father had bequeathed to him by becoming a tradesman in his own person. As for Fan, [Pg 222]she had been fully persuaded from the first that Oliver would ruin himself commercially—no less than socially. Oliver denied the necessity stoutly, and when it was thrust upon him, quoted, as Fan considered, irrelevantly, if not irreverently, the Divine assertion that a man’s life does not consist of the things which at the best he only seems to possess.

Hartley, of the now renowned firm of Hartley, Norris, & Co., had stuck to trade down to the present generation. But then trade had made of the representative Hartley not simply a man, but a gentleman so far beyond challenge that he had not merely been spared from the counting-house and warehouses to Oxford, he had been permitted to become a sleeping partner, enjoying the funds without undergoing any of the toils of the huge, opulent concern which his immediate predecessors had founded, pushed, and fostered by unremitting [Pg 223]exertions, giving themselves heart and soul to the business.

John Hartley, in his character of pure gainer by the struggles and victories of his father and partners in their branch of trade, had developed very much into a cultivated dilettante. The chief sign he gave of having inherited any of the individual vigour and ambition of his stock, was in the zeal and determination with which he avoided the slightest association—save by name and the receipt of the lion’s share of the profits—with the business. Yet, according to Oliver Constable’s principles, John Hartley stood morally responsible for it in its every detail, down to its pettiest customer and its meanest workman, while his responsibility was not confined to his own business and his conduct in its discharge, but extended to his influence over the whole trading class, to which, in spite of every protest, he distinctly belonged.

Oliver said he would not judge John [Pg 224]Hartley. No doubt the man had an æsthetic bent, and he was squeamish where one kind of vulgarity was concerned. These idiosyncrasies led him almost perforce to dedicate himself to the refining of his tastes and the beautifying of his estate and house—well-nigh to the same extent as the squire of Copley Grange dedicated himself to a like evangel. And naturally the sleeping partner and the squire took to each other’s society, silently agreeing to sink into oblivion the gulf between the gentle fore-fathers of the one and the rude progenitors of the other.

John Hartley hit on an earl’s daughter with an equally accommodating memory to consent to be his wife, and never afterwards to allude, except by a calm, smiling, cleverly timed jest, which disarmed criticism and took the censorious world by storm, to the source of the excess of luxuries with which her husband was able to surround her.

[Pg 225]

It was no business of Oliver Constable’s, whatever he might think; he was not called upon to proclaim John Hartley a cowardly shirker and slurrer over of his obligations, an absentee from his post of duty, a deserter of his class. Certainly Hartley was not singular in his interpretation of the rights and privileges of the inheritor of a great firm and its wealth. He went with the multitude in his use or abuse of the choice of occupations and interests which he commanded. Even an earnest, enthusiastic commentator on the ‘grand old name of gentleman,’ who has proved to the gaping world’s edification that it may be borne by a tradesman of the most unsavoury sort, has been forced by the clamorous exigencies of public opinion to allow her hero a problematical title to gentle birth and to wed him to the noble daughter of a sorry gentleman; above all—strange incongruity to promote the pseudo-tradesman [Pg 226]to the rank of a squire, and the society of the country squirearchy, before he dies.

But Oliver was roused from his equanimity when he shared the sensation felt by all Friarton at the news that John Hartley had come down with Lady Cicely and their household to be even nearer neighbours to the Constables than the Stanhopes were, by occupying Copley Grange, lent to them by the squire, while the sleeping partner showed himself wide awake in contesting the representation of the county, just left vacant by the death of the late member.

Hartleys to right of him, Stanhopes to left of him, how could Oliver resist the admission, for the moment at least, that he was with them and not with the Dadd and Polley set, to which he had sent in his adherence? For John Hartley made his first canvassing call on his next neighbour the miller and baker, and though he did not conceal that he was at Friarton Mill to solicit political support, he acknowledged [Pg 227]there, as he was prepared to announce on the hustings, that he was a tradesman, and frankly claimed the vote of a brother-tradesman, who understood John Hartley’s circumstances and the advantage of returning him to Parliament.

John Hartley was a quiet agreeable man, handsome, with a slightly affected assumption of Bohemian fashions in his ferocious beard, semi-artistic slouched sombrero, and colossal meerschaum. In reality he had not the slightest taint of the Bohemian about him, being pacific, prudent, and somewhat obstinate. He had only adopted the gentlemanlike Bohemian as being the reverse of the gentlemanlike tradesman.

Lady Cicely called on Miss Constable. Lady Cicely was not childish or girlish, like Agneta Stanhope. The sleeping partner’s partner admired Friarton Mill in a well-bred way, but she never made the smallest pretence of going mad for rusticity or of playing at [Pg 228]being a rustic. Neither did she mistake Fan for the typical Miller’s daughter. The visitor took care, notwithstanding, to infer with perfect tact, all the while, that she was a little struck by finding Miss Constable a different person from what might have been expected. Not that Lady Cicely implied Fan was her equal. Lady Cicely was a stout, commonplace, slightly stolid young woman—the least gratifying, to a highly-trained eye, of all John Hartley’s surroundings, so that one had to consider there was that in her origin which indemnified the mind for the loss—bordering on an offence—to the eye. Still she was not without dignity in her double chin, and certainly not without mind; she never lost sight of the fact, or suffered Fan to lose sight of it for a moment, though it was by no means insisted on with unladylike self-assertion, it was quietly taken for granted, that an earl’s daughter and a tradesman’s daughter belonged to opposite poles of [Pg 229]society which no two people in their senses could confuse. But she administered the same subtle compensation bestowed by Agneta Stanhope, when the couple of aristocrats agreed in placing Fan quite on a level with her former Friarton patronesses.

In addition, Lady Cicely civilly and sensibly recognised the points in common between her husband and Oliver Constable, and connected the men together by the safe general term ‘business men.’ ‘Mr. Hartley has never taken an active part in the affairs of his firm, he leaves everything to his partners,’ she was so good as to explain to Fan; ‘but of course the interests of trade are his interests, and he will look after them in the House if he is returned for the county. He and Mr. Constable ought to have a great deal to say to each other, so that we depend on your brother’s dining with us next week at the Grange. He must reserve a day for us when we are quite by ourselves—you [Pg 230]will keep him in mind—won’t you?’ Lady Cicely almost pled with Fan, though she never dreamt of including the sister, who smiled a little grimly at the significant omission, in the invitation to the brother.

Lady Cicely was too comfortably resigned and independent on her own account to care much for public favour, but, like a dutiful wife, she coveted it, so far as she saw her way to it, for her husband. She desired to see him in Parliament because so many of her set were there. She did not trouble herself much about Mr. Hartley’s being in trade—so many people whom she knew had something to do with trade now-a-days—still it was advisable that he should be pointed out as M.P. for his native county, as well as sleeping partner in Hartley, Norris, & Co.

After all, Fan did not find fault altogether with the Hartleys’ self-interested notice. It was fully understood to be a give-and-take connection. [Pg 231]It had none of that sole prerogative of bestowing honour—to which Fan had so bitterly objected in former days. To be sure, the Hartleys were not like the royally frank and free Stanhopes. Oh, no. Mr. Hartley and Lady Cicely would never raise their social inferiors by generous adoption into the upper ranks, or even stoop magnanimously to the lower. Though indeed, had Oliver Constable so chosen, it was in his power to be, in his degree, the man of university training and wide travel, the polished man of civilised society, who had shaken himself loose from all save the money earned by trade, which John Hartley showed himself with the approbation of everybody, save a few fanatics.

But Oliver might make use of the Hartleys, as the Hartleys were plainly disposed to make use of him. Fan was ready in this silent, mutual compact, to be of benefit to the Hartleys; she returned Lady Cicely’s call, though Fan was not to dine [Pg 232]at Copley Grange—since it was necessary to draw the line somewhere—and in the course of the call consented to the hostess’s extracting a considerable amount of available information about the place and people from the guest. Fan spoke to her acquaintances down to the Polleys and Dadds of Lady Cicely’s neighbourliness and willingness to confer her countenance on Friarton, in return for Friarton’s votes to her husband.

When Lady Cicely easily succeeded, late in the day, in securing the distinction of being appointed one of the stall-keepers at a bazaar, and the chief patroness of a conversazione in the neglected museum, in the course of caterprises undertaken by an indefatigable eleemosynary committee in the behalf of the local charities, Fan cheerfully worked and catered for her ladyship’s stall, and for the sale of her packets of tickets.

It seemed as if Oliver must be on John [Pg 233]Hartley’s committee, the list of whose members soon bore the bold scrawl of Harry Stanhope’s name. The young fellow chose to write himself, with his most unyeomanlike fist, ‘Harry Stanhope, yeoman.’ It appeared as if the Oxford-bred miller must be dragged forward, in his own despite, to take the place which fortune and education had given him, to ride and drive, and lunch and speechify, here and there, in the heat of faction, with those to whom he was really allied, so as to forget the mill and the baker’s shop with their drudgery, and to forget along with them other shops and their drudgeries, other shopkeepers with their aims and rewards—high or low—of which Oliver Constable’s mind had lately been full.

It looked as if Oliver were going to comply with the irresistible demands made upon him as a man and a citizen. He received John Hartley with tolerable cordiality. The one man listened to the other’s private explanations [Pg 234]as well as to his public speeches, and, in order to do both fairly, Oliver not only attended the meetings the candidate was calling, but accepted his invitations to dine en famille with him and Lady Cicely. The result, which Oliver could not well avoid, was that a considerable amount of familiarity was established between him and the Hartleys. He was hailed as an ally by John Hartley on all occasions; and it was Oliver’s arm which Lady Cicely took when she left her stall at the bazaar to go to the refreshment table, and when she walked the whole length and breadth of the town-hall in order to make her purchases from her fellow-stall-keepers.

Fan was growing elated at the turn events were taking, and the precedence thrust on Oliver which he could no longer escape accepting. And if he accepted it, he must needs lose sight of his hobby and step involuntarily, as it were, to a vantage ground from which it would [Pg 235]hardly be possible for him to retreat afterwards. Mr. Hartley was the Liberal member largely upheld by the tradespeople, who not merely approved of his principles—which, though they had never come to the front before, were unlike his practice, and belonged to his trade descent and trade interests—but were proud of him as a tradesman himself. Still no doubt it was on so gigantic a scale and with such advantages that the ordinary lineaments of his class were a good deal effaced, and that it was out of the question for him to fraternise with the smaller fry. He was also, through his personal antecedents, habits and predilections, and notably through his marriage with Lady Cicely, at one with the opposite side—supported by the great bulk of the professional men who were apt to be more Conservative than the Conservative county gentry and Conservative nobility to whose skirts the professional men clung. It was no matter that John Hartley was fighting in a political [Pg 236]battle against Colonel Hastings, the head of the ancient house of Hastings of Westmote and the nephew of the Marquis of Saltmarsh.

The strife in its greatest keenness was conducted with the courtesy of gentlemen. Between their electioneering bouts, the men met not merely as amicable foes, but as social allies in the houses of their common acquaintances. John Hartley and Colonel Hastings agreed to differ. They were more than familiar with each other’s faces. They were members of the same clubs—if not of the Reform and Carlton—of the Alpine and Travellers’ Clubs, and Colonel Hastings was married to an old neighbour and early friend of Lady Cicely Hartley’s.

Therefore it could not be held that Oliver Constable was necessarily consigning himself to farther fraternity with the lower orders when he espoused the cause of John Hartley.

But had he espoused the cause? All at once, with the thrill of a shock—not only to [Pg 237]Fan and the Hartleys, but to the whole Liberal party—including the defaulter’s fellow-tradesmen, nay, to the very Conservatives, who gave the newcomer only a half-hearted gibing welcome, as to an erratic wavering adherent, who was not at all to be depended upon—Oliver marched over with his single vote to the enemy.

It sounded as if he were a turncoat, it brought down upon Oliver the indignant accusation and ugly name, though there was nothing on earth to be gained by it, as Fan protested piteously. Oliver achieved the climax of inconsistency by figuring as a Conservative. ‘I am not a Conservative,’ he denied, and then added hastily, ‘but what’s in a name? I never was and never will be a party man,’ he cried; ‘and I am going to stand by Hastings because I think he is less of a party man than Hartley. I don’t say that both are not honest men according to their lights, but Hastings is either [Pg 238]better qualified to judge for himself, or he is more bent on acting in obedience to his judgment and conscience. He has pledged himself to do what he can for more than one or two measures which carry justice and righteousness on their face, that I would to God Englishmen of all parties were manly and true enough to unite and carry through, but which are not in the rôle of Hastings’ party any more than they are on the cards of the Liberals. Hartley will not bring forward or second one of these bills; on the contrary, he will throw what weight he possesses in the opposite scale. He has said as much. He is too cautious, too Conservative at heart—under his Liberal cloak if you will—too selfish in grasping and not scattering—not even risking his gains, too bound to a clique to do anything else. I don’t go in for Hastings in everything, not by a long chalk; I am not a Conservative, but since there is only the choice between these two, on the whole I [Pg 239]prefer Hastings and his individual politics, let us say, to Hartley and his general creed.’

Oliver might prefer whom he liked. He was a freeborn subject of her Majesty, and undoubtedly he was at liberty to make his selection, but he received little toleration and less sympathy in his withdrawal from his party. His secession was met with a burst of reprobation. Old Dadd called him ‘that hair-splitting fool.’ Mrs. Polley argued it was all very well to have a mind of one’s own, but sheer refractoriness would not sell loaves. See if Oliver Constable had not managed with his college learning to anger his customers all round. She went in for her own opinions, as most of her hearers knew, but for men and women in business not to be able to keep their minds to themselves on occasions, and behave as their best friends had a right to expect of them, which was not to be weathercocks, and fly in the face of their associates and supporters, [Pg 240]was rank conceit and impertinence, little short of madness.

Not even Mr. Holland with the deacons of the chapel could pass by Oliver’s conduct without remonstrance, seeing that it threatened serious damage to the brilliant prosperity just dawning on the congregation.

The chapel had been almost to a man for John Hartley. Not that he was himself a chapel-man. As might have been supposed, the plain and pithy, bald and homely Nonconformist worship was extremely repugnant to him. But he had shown that he retained a reserve of his father’s and grandfather’s sharpness in seizing an advantage, when he renewed, in a manner, his alliance with the chapel, in anticipation of his election. He recalled to his recollection, what he had apparently long forgotten, that his father had been brought up a dissenter, and had lived and died a maintainer of dissent in his own person. John Hartley [Pg 241]proved satisfactorily his powers of memory, by all at once bringing out a hidden store of knowledge of dissenting annals—exceedingly acceptable to a religious body accustomed to be, not to say slighted, but ignored, by their brethren of the church. He betrayed a sentimental inclination to linger over and dally with these old associations, which served to propitiate the chapel members for his desertion of their communion. He was not guilty of absolute misstatement when he suffered it to be inferred that circumstances had been against him. The difficulties of his position, the entanglements of the circle in which he moved, especially the natural influence of Lady Cicely, had drawn him back into the bosom of a church which was at last bestirring itself, and testifying to the good it had got from the noble protests of the early Puritans and the later Methodists against its periods of latitudinarianism.

John Hartley did not pretend that he would [Pg 242]return to the ranks of the nonconformists, and the chapel people of Friarton were too reasonable to expect it of a man like him. But he treated them with great respect, almost with pensive tenderness. He called upon Mr. Holland and mentioned in conversation that his father had sat under the profitable ministry of an able and pious grand-uncle of the Friarton pastor’s. John Hartley requested to be taken into the chapel on a week-day, though it did not seem to occur to him to attend the Wednesday lecture or the Friday prayer-meeting, and then asked humbly if he might be permitted to present new, more efficient, and ornamental chandeliers, to help to shed material light on the congregation—a request which was handsomely granted.

Lady Cicely called on Mrs. Holland, and begged the shape of her baby’s pinafore, thus showing that, though Lady Cicely was by every inherited affinity a churchwoman, she was, [Pg 243]nevertheless, so far leavened by her husband’s purer ecclesiastical origin, as not to suspect contamination lurking in a dissenting baby’s bib and frills. The result was that the chapel people—from Mr. Holland to Jack Dadd—were strongly in favour of John Hartley, to the extent of considering him in part their own property and candidate. For though he had not promised to procure the disestablishment of the church, he had engaged to remain neutral on the Burials Bill, while Colonel Hastings was openly antagonistic to dissenting prayers prayed by a dissenting clergyman, over a dissenter’s corpse in a parish churchyard. And the chapel constituents were assured they would procure yet better terms from their member. They began to grow rashly secure of his good offices and to plume themselves beforehand on the distinction that was awaiting them.

Oliver’s fresh secession was therefore not [Pg 244]only an affront to his co-religionists, they were driven to reckon him guilty of uncalled-for schism and lukewarm treachery, where the interests of the chapel were concerned. For unluckily, his example affected others—only a contemptible few, no doubt—malcontents, jealous of the leading deacons and the larger contributors, such as were to be found in every congregation, discontented Adullamites, the breath of whose nostrils was mischief. These were mostly men among the poorer members of no repute, who had failed in business, who had erred in their religious profession and moral practice, persons who did little credit to Oliver Constable as his followers, on whom he probably did not count, as he did not encourage their adherence. But he made them prominent to the disgust of the rest of the congregation. He instigated them, whether he meant it or not, when they would otherwise have wrangled aimlessly, to show that ‘the [Pg 245]connection’ was divided, to make a definite demonstration, which, however small, was a scandal in the eyes of the magnates of the chapel, for Colonel Hastings.

There were meetings official and unofficial in the chapel vestry and in members’ houses, that the congregation might discuss among themselves the question of Oliver Constable’s delinquency. There were loud and long whisperings about him as not only disaffected, but as a young fellow of dangerous license of opinion, who would in all likelihood end in rationalism and free-thinking. ’Liza Polley regarded him, in horrified fascination, as a dreadful young genius, who, in his pride of unsanctified intellect, dared to defy Mr. Holland and Mr. Dadd. Yet she had never heard such naughty words as Jack Dadd would let fall sometimes, drop from Oliver’s mouth. He was a regular and reverent worshipper at the chapel. Nobody had ever seen him ‘screwed’ [Pg 246]or so much as half screwed, though he kept company on occasions with the young shopkeepers of the town. He was understood to be domestic in his habits. He was known to consider the poor with even an excess of liberality, while he sought to do it without observation. ’Liza had heard him laughed at for the absurd rigidity of his scruples in the conduct of his business. But she feared it would be all the worse for Oliver, if he turned out, after all, to be little better than an atheist, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Surely nobody would think him ‘a great catch’ now. The fact that his suit to her had come to nothing, was like one of those deliverances—of which one reads in good books.

Oliver was not left in partial ignorance of the ordeal through which he was passing. Notably the minister, and next to him one qualified member after another, were appointed to deal with the offender. Oliver found the minister the least arrogant and intolerant of his [Pg 247]inquisitors. But even Mr. Holland could not see what Oliver thought he saw of the comparative insignificance of the burial of the dead to the welfare of the living. Mr. Holland looked as if he too considered Oliver’s citation of the injunction, ‘let the dead bury their dead,’ misapplied, as Fan had judged his quotation of other maxims which she did not propose to treat as of no weight in themselves. Mr. Holland talked of institutions and organisations, signs and precedents, of the urgent necessity for unity among brethren, of preserving the peace of the congregation, of making everything give place to the great interests of nonconformity in England, of the compulsion laid upon men that they should work with the tools which Providence had put into their hands.

But here Oliver was as obdurate and slow of comprehension as his pastor could be on the respective claims of the dead and the living.

‘Right and wrong can never undergo change [Pg 248]or modification,’ protested Oliver hotly. ‘I was a man before I was a Christian. I am a Christian just because I am convinced Christianity is the one sheet anchor and lever for humanity. I was and am a Christian before I ever will be a Nonconformist.’

The result was that Oliver found himself isolated and ostracised, viewed as a contumacious chapel member, suffered of course to continue among the loyal members, because there was no formula by which he could be expelled on such grounds, but no longer trusted and approved of; so far from it, he was in the meantime an object of reprobation to the greater number of his brethren.

Perhaps it could not be helped, perhaps he partly deserved his condemnation. For Oliver was not altogether clear in his judgment and conscience where nonconformity was concerned. He was by constitution a many-sided man, prone to eclecticism on most subjects, except, [Pg 249]indeed, on what were to him the eternal verities of right and wrong in life, and in a divinely ordained religion. He must always be more or less at variance with men who were never divided in their minds on the merits of all other questions which, to Oliver Constable, were, to say the least, open to discussion.

He had read and seen a good deal on both sides of English ecclesiastical history. He had sympathies with both. His heroes stood ranked under opposing banners. He gave in his adherence to Jeremy Taylor and Bishop Butler and Samuel Wilberforce, as well as to Richard Baxter and John Wesley and Robert Hall.

But Oliver had been brought up a nonconformist. He had gone with his father to the chapel, while Fan had gone with her mother to the church.

There had been no necessary strife in the family on this account. Peter Constable, though a man of inferior abilities to his son, [Pg 250]had possessed some mental features in common with Oliver. Peter had respected his wife’s form of faith as she had respected his. Occasionally he had joined in her service and she had joined in his, but in proportion as there was no rancorous war of creeds, there had been no proselytism. To Oliver the chapel was the church of his fathers, and of his section of the community. He was perfectly sensible of the defects of its system, but he was far from prepared to grant that the merits did not exceed the defects, and still less that the defects of dissenters were more ruinous than the shortcomings of churchmen.

Under this impression, Oliver held it disloyal to abandon the chapel, any more than the class to which he belonged. At the same time he had his doubts and scruples. But just as he was a man of much stronger imagination and capacity for idealisation than John Hartley was, Oliver did not feel offended by the bareness and [Pg 251]ruggedness of the ecclesiastical ways he trod. He saw beyond them, even as he saw beyond the modern smoothness and smartness of the chapel building, back into what struck him as the less objectionable gauntness and grimness of its predecessor in which earnest and fervent men had worshipped, often to the peril and loss of their earthly joys and worldly goods. There were records in existence which proved that the chapel had been among the earliest of its kind in England. When Oliver thought that contemporaries and allies of John Milton and John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, Blake and Daniel Defoe—who, it seems, has been convicted of time-serving and double-dealing, but who was so stout and unflinching a patriot withal, that one may be tempted to prefer Defoe’s shuffling to some later men’s consistency—Oliver Constable laughed at the idea of men of narrow and uncultured intellect and vulgar bumptiousness being the sole figures that peopled the region in which he [Pg 252]had come to sit apart, conscious that he was looked upon as an interloper and false friend, unworthy of the right hand of fellowship, or of the confidence of his companions.

John Hartley won the election mainly by the support of the dissenters—whom, however, success did not at once soften to the renegade.

Oliver was a little liable to look over the heads of his subordinates as well as his equals, to be possessed by his purpose instead of possessing it, and to follow it out—having no attention to spare for the signs of the times, though he was particularly calculated to call them forth in hostile array, and they were certain to count largely in the result. It took Oliver by surprise when he was met by the ‘poser’ which he might reasonably have expected, of resistance and anarchy in his own dominions, where he had been seeking to enact transcendental laws and attempting to carry out, not political or social, but moral [Pg 254]economy—not every man for himself alone, but every man for his neighbour still more, ‘in honour preferring one another,’ which Oliver persisted in regarding as the only worthy and enduring trade principles.

There had been growls of dissatisfaction, sneers of scepticism, tacit defiance in the mill and the bakehouse, which had all passed unheeded by Oliver, before the storm broke forth. It began with a comparatively trifling émeute in the mill after the miller’s men had been comparing notes with the journeymen bakers who went far before the grinders of the raw grain in crude, shallow quickness of reasoning and one-sided, undigested knowledge. The journeymen bakers first crammed the young millers with the rank growth of their supposed grievances, and then adroitly pushed the crammed men before them, into the breach, to open the battle with Oliver their common enemy.

There were long-standing usages and privileges [Pg 255]in the miller and baker trades which Oliver had thought fit to abolish without asking the consent of his servants farther than in the address which he delivered on entering into possession of the mill and the shop, and that lay beyond the comprehension of the cleverest man among them, who immediately made up his mind that it was all ‘soft sawder’ and ‘book-learning bosh.’ The men chose to regard these time-out-of-mind customs and liberties, though they had no direct bearing on any miller’s or baker’s prosperity, and were even sometimes prejudicial to fair play among the men themselves, as their rules to which they had agreed on entering their trades. No master had any right to interfere with and overturn these rules without the men’s concurrence; above all, they were not such fools as to be defrauded of them by a fine assumption of philanthropy on the part of their antagonist.

Oliver discovered that there had been disobedience [Pg 256]and evasion of a regulation which he had laid down at the Mill, that two different qualities of grain, whether coming from the same or different owners, should not from that time forward be so taken and ground together as to produce a spurious average of quality, even when that average might be accepted with ignorant or indifferent acquiescence in the case of the better as well as the worse wheat.

‘Why did you not attend to what I said, Green?’ enquired Oliver angrily. ‘Mind that this lumping together does not occur again. At the best it is a slovenly, inaccurate makeshift for clean, correct work, which prevents a proper estimate of each quality of grain and adulterates flour at the mill; at the worst it is an imposition and a cheat, hiding careless negligence on our part, or consenting to withdraw the surplus fineness and cleanness of one man’s growth of corn in order to add it to the deficient worth of another man’s crop. I will not have it.’

[Pg 257]

‘It were a saving of trouble as nobody objected to, instead of a wexing petikularity,’ said Ned, startling Oliver by speaking again, and that with such fluency as to render it suspicious whether the fluency, together with the bluster, could proceed originally from monosyllabic, stolid Ned. ‘It were always done afore my day, and I dunnot see why it shouldn’t be done no longer. I can tell you Maine, as owns the best stuff, wunnot thank you for turning it out bolted that white it might be furrin flour. Nobody will believe it native, though he take his Bible oath on it. Every customer will swear it’s ’Mericain and has come over in casks, and will sour afore you can say “Jack Robinson.” And Wade, he wunnot own his stuff, as you’d make it come out, in the course of nature and machinery. He’ll swear it’s been tampered with, and no wonder, since he’ll not find a buyer for it on this side of Lon’on. He’ll be forced to mix what might have been food for men in his [Pg 258]horse and cattle’s mashes, or to fling it to his cocks and hens. Friarton Mill will have seen the last of his custom,’ ended Ned sardonically.

‘Never mind that, it is my business; do what I bid you.’

‘And the trouble of stowing away the emptyings of the sacks separate, and of setting and keeping the mill a-going for two bouts, which need only have been one, will be your business too?’ said Ned, like all willing learners going considerably beyond the bounds of his lesson and converting bluster into insolence. ‘It is a fine gentleman scholard’s nonsense, which is downright oonreasonable as well. Dang it, I’ll have nowt to do with it,’ protested Ned, flinging down a spade which he had in his hand with a noisy clatter.

‘Leave it alone then, my man, and come to me at the office for your wages,’ said Oliver, walking away.

Green did not resume his work that afternoon, [Pg 259]neither did the other men and lads. The mill stood, without anything wrong about the gear which had in these modern times rendered a lack of water a deficiency to be coped with. Oliver missed its accustomed hum and splash, while ‘the merry millers,’ merry no longer, hung about and consulted together, sulky and stubborn-looking.

But next day the premature shabby strike somehow collapsed. Its promoters, including Green, chopfallen and taciturn as of old, were at their duties again, to which Oliver suffered them to return without farther words.

It was otherwise in the bake-shop. There the mutiny was systematised and ripe, and though it did not carry the whole establishment with it, it cost Oliver his manager, some of his best hands, and more than it seemed possible for him to recover from.

Jim Hull came to Oliver one day in the back parlour. Speak of the great Napoleon’s features [Pg 260]resembling a finely cut cameo, Jim Hull’s nose, mouth, and chin were quite as hard, clear and set when he refused every parley or overture of good-fellowship in the shape of refreshment, and put it to his master point-blank: ‘Do you continue of the same mind, Master Oliver, that no alum, nor no other harmless stuff for whitening the bread, be used in the bakehouse, and that all sorts of fancy bread, down to them rolls, be weighed and sold by the pound, like the reg’lar loaf?’

‘I do, Jim,’ said Oliver concisely.

‘Have you taken it into consideration, sir,’ went on Jim solemnly, ‘that customers as are used to white bread and don’t want brown won’t buy bread which, though it may be made of first-rate flour, looks as if it were compounded of ’alf and ’alf. There’s a deal in the look of a thing in all trades,’ said Jim almost wistfully, ‘and folk is fanciful, and is guided by the look as well as by the taste. Nay, the taste gets [Pg 261]trained to prefer what it has been accustomed to. There’s a many will have pepper-dust rather than pepper, and chicory before coffee.’

‘And bread either flavourless or with a suspicion of sourness or bitterness instead of sweet bread, eh, Jim?’ chimed in Oliver. ‘Then tastes must be reclaimed from their vitiated state for the sake of the tasters, that’s all. I have not become a baker to sell adulterated bread of dubious weight, even if the adulteration were innocent and the weight in favour of the buyer. I mean to sell pure bread, by an exact measure.’

‘Bread has always been divided into two classes,’ remonstrated Jim, growing stiff and stern again: ‘the plain and the fancy. The plain has been measured by weight, the fancy——’

‘By fancy,’ interrupted Oliver. ‘But you are aware, Jim, that if any buyer choose to buy, by the pound, cottage loaves which, no less than rolls, go under the head of fancy bread, the [Pg 262]baker is bound to sell them by weight, though I do not suppose he can be fined for apportioning them according to fancy if there is no demand to the contrary.’

‘It ain’t the custom,’ said Jim testily. ‘I crave your pardon, sir, but to put it in that way is to insult an honest man as would not offer less than the bulk of an article for its money’s worth, not though you paid him for doing it in golden guineas. Have you ever thought of that, Master Oliver, of the slur you are ready to cast on other bakers—on your own father, for instance, that always did as he would be done by, and on all as worked under him in responsible situations?’

Oliver flushed. ‘There is no reason to look at the change in that light, Jim,’ he said earnestly. ‘I know my father was an honest man. There is no piece of knowledge I possess which I would be more unwilling to give up. I have never for a moment suspected your [Pg 263]integrity—I would as soon question my own. But every man must act according to his individual light. These practices we are talking about are objectionable and can easily be rendered dishonest. At least everybody should know the nature and amount of breadstuff, like any other stuff, that he gets for his money, though I don’t say he is cheated if he knowingly and willingly takes an artificially bleached, roughly calculated purchase, several ounces under or over the mark, for the look or the fashion of it. The worst is that few people know what they are about in such transactions.’

‘Well, all I have to say, Master Oliver,’ said Jim doggedly, ‘these are a deal too fine distinctions for me. I cannot consent to be treated like a man as has long been a party, in the capacity of foreman, to defrauding the public of their due—me as never tampered with light weights, which your father would have been the [Pg 264]last to even either me or hisself to—not in our whole lives. I tell you, sir, it is putting shame on us both, and on a respectable trade, for you to sport them whims and fads in carrying it on at this time of day. Nobody will thank you for it, and as for your dark-coloured, home-tasted bread, nobody will like it or buy it. You’ll soon throw to the dogs as fine a baking business as was ever worked up in more than one generation.’

‘I can’t help that,’ said Oliver inflexibly. ‘If the townspeople are fools and pin their faith to mock instead of to real merits, it shall be in spite of me and not because of me.’

‘Then, Master Oliver, it’s right I should speak out. My nephew ’Arry, as was ready, with a little help, to buy the old business if it had come into the market, will begin in Friarton, on his own account, this here Michaelmas. He has axed me to jine him. And why shouldn’t I? I would not have deserted the old concern [Pg 265]if I could have been of any use. But it seems my experience was all wrong. I’m too old a cock to begin afresh. Besides, I’m free to tell you the mode followed by a young gentleman as knows nothing of trade save out of books, and is, if he will pardon me for mentioning it, a rank enthusiast, will be all downhill and no mistake. I cannot stop you, Master Oliver; you refuse to be guided by me, so I must wash my hands of you, and jine my nephew ’Arry, to whom I can do a good turn, though it goes sore against the grain if you’ll believe me, sir, to start an opposition to Constable’s business, as I helped to make flourish, and which was the pride of my ’eart, years before you came into the world, Master Oliver.’ As Jim ended a slight quiver passed over his compact features.

‘I believe you, Jim,’ said Oliver gravely, ‘and I, for my part, am so sorry to lose you that you may guess how much the principles are to me which compel such a sacrifice.’

[Pg 266]

Jim shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

Constable’s baking business without Jim Hull was sure to be crippled for a time, but there were other kinds of crippling going on, and a worse mess for Oliver to get into.

Oliver, in his consciousness of his own shortcomings, and his passion for independence and individuality, was not so much inclined to insist on punctuality and method in his subordinates as most new brooms show themselves. But he happened to remark that what rules and penalties were imposed, had gradually come to be inflicted chiefly on the younger journeymen and apprentices. The elder and more skilled bakers took upon them, in the right of their value to Oliver and the difficulty of replacing them on an emergency, to infringe the orders and do their work earlier or later, faster or slower, according to their convenience and inclination, putting about and causing some slight injury to the subordinates, [Pg 267]and creating a certain amount of disorder in the establishment. In place of these experts presenting a good example to their juniors, the latter were stimulated in the reverse direction, and prompted to acquire such qualities as might enable them in their turn to shirk obligations and throw the weight of drudgery and discipline on their weaker, more untrained fellows.

Oliver was determined this should not be. He heard that the baker Webster was conspicuous at this game, that he rarely kept his time, that he compressed his kneading into the briefest operation compatible with success, that he set his sponge at the latest date, and was guilty of the same recklessness in placing his batch in the oven, so that he imperilled his whole night and morning’s work, though he might escape by the skin of the teeth from reducing it—either to a sodden mass or a cinder, as the oven fire served.

[Pg 268]

Webster was a man given over to a variety of conflicting interests and distractions, rather than the victim of one vice; he was unsettled more than dissipated, still he appeared in the bakehouse occasionally the worse for drink.

Oliver set himself to convict his servant—in name, in one of his misdemeanours, and going into the bakehouse early one morning when the bakers were about to subject the risen dough to the second kneading, he found Webster’s place vacant; a friend had contrived to go through the first process for Webster’s batch as well as for his own, but was halting ere he proceeded to complete the performance. Oliver remarked aloud that Webster was absent from his work, and ordered that his batch should be worked up and put into the oven, without waiting for his arrival or asking his permission, while Jim Hull, who was still in office, should challenge the defender for non-attendance.

But this quick catching up of Webster for [Pg 269]neglect of duty was quite another affair from the neighbourly help which connived at and concealed his delinquencies. And Jim Hull looked aggrieved in his own person and worried by Oliver’s interference. ‘It ain’t any good,’ he said in an undertone to Oliver. ‘Webster won’t be put upon, he’ll take his way, but it’s a fact he’ll get more dough through his hands, to better purpose, in ten minutes than the other lads will in twenty.’

‘All the same he’ll not put upon me and the rest of the men, as I take it he does. Who made him an exception to the rest? Put upon indeed! I should like to know who is in danger of being put upon. Jim Hull, you are getting soft in your old age. Let some of these fellows do Webster’s job,’ said Oliver angrily.

‘The’ve got their own jobs, and some of them is hard enough pushed to turn out presentable batches for themselves. I tell you it ain’t every man can take Webster’s place. [Pg 270]That there batch of his is for Dr. Riley’s family. The doctor is difficult to please in his bread, and he sets on some of his patients to be as cranky as hisself,’ grumbled Jim.

‘I’m sorry for Riley and his patients then,’ said Oliver shortly. ‘Is there no baker here,’ Oliver raised his voice slightly so as to be heard by more than Jim, ‘who can knead Webster’s stuff in addition to his own?’

No man spoke. Each felt scrupulous as to the kneading which was necessary for his batch this morning. Clearly the movement to call Webster to order was not popular, even though it arose from his own fault, and that a fault which only a sprinkling of the men present would have presumed to commit.

Jim Hull began slowly to strip the jacket from his rheumatic shoulders in the hot steaming air. As he did so he repeated still more surlily, ‘It ain’t every man can take Webster’s place. Baking itself ain’t a trade which a young [Pg 271]fellow can pick up at his feet any day, anyhow, and read the rights and wrongs of it straight off—by heart, like a printed page, then give his orders conformable.’

‘Hold on, Jim.’ Oliver stopped his foreman’s preparations. ‘I suppose you think I’ve forgotten any lessons I ever learnt. And as for those fellows yonder,’ pointing to the row of figures at the baking-boards, ‘who are grinning behind their shirt-sleeves and their heads powdered like flunkeys—they are a set of flunkeys to Webster or any ringleader who chooses to hold the asses by the ears of their class prejudices and petty vices— they believe I’m speaking of what I know nothing about, or that I set them to do a task which I hold to be a degradation, therefore I am dependent on their skill and fidelity—Heaven help me! and if I were famishing I should perish for lack of bread without their assistance. You and they are mightily mistaken though, Jim.’

Oliver suited the action to the word, flung off his coat, bared his long sinewy arms to the shoulders, advanced to the vacant board, and laid hold of the dough fast becoming flat and unprofitable. In spite of his passion he felt shy and awkward under the consciousness of the adverse, critical eyes glancing at him, some of them in sheer amazement, some of them in jealous resentment, some of them in sly amusement, and only a very few of them in dubious generous approbation. He distrusted his qualifications with reason. But when was he not awkward? and it was surely possible for a [Pg 273]man of his muscle and modicum of experience to knead dough into a passable condition and dispose of it in an oven.

As Oliver solemnly pounded at his lump of dough, he was assailed mentally by successive trains of thought, contradictory, sympathetic, purely humorous.

In the first place he was angrily sensible of the same momentary rush of shamefacedness, in trying to bake before his bakers, that he had felt in first standing in his shop-door before his fellow-townsmen—yet what was there in this fine, white flour, powdering him and his companions alike, to stain a man with so disgraceful a stain that in the case of poor Neaves, the very reflection of it caused the weak undergraduate to leap into the Isis in order to wash out the blot and his miserable life with it? Was the mark so much more invidious than the soil which Neaves’s quondam companions had been fain enough to contract from the earth of [Pg 274]hunting fields, or the soil of stables and kennels, or the mire of race-courses, or even the smoke and blood of a battle-field—to pass through which without ‘falling into a funk,’ if the chance came his way, without any deed of his, constituted every young man a hero?

Why should the mere inference of having to do with wheat as it was made into bread to feed the multitudes, operate more violently upon men’s stupid, snobbish prejudices than the report of being mixed up with barley in the course of becoming malt, or with hops as they passed into ale—to form refreshment for the thirsty, no doubt? But the refreshment was decidedly open to abuse when the great distillers and brewers might also be the great licensed victuallers, the invisible, irresponsible landlords of scores and hundreds of gin-palaces and ale-houses, as well as the builders of churches and founders of schools.

Oliver had a fleeting vision of Mrs. Hilliard’s [Pg 275]cool, fresh drawing-room in contrast to the hot vapour-laden bakehouse, with Catherine Hilliard bidding men fight or die, or speak and witness for the truth—but never mix flour, yeast and salt, and convert leaven into wholesome bread, to fill the mouths and recruit the strength of hungry, fainting creatures.

Oliver saw Harry Stanhope standing without his coat, bareheaded, on his half-laden cart, ‘forking’ his sheaves of corn, and knew that was one thing in the estimation of the world and kneading dough was quite another. There was as great a difference between them as that between a bar of iron and a twopenny nail. Yet Oliver remembered the American philosopher Thoreau, and his delight in the sign of self-sufficing independence which he recognised in the act of baking his own bread. What a manly, ay, a kingly work Thoreau had made of it, as historians and poets had dealt with the picturesque initiatory steps taken [Pg 276]by Cincinnatus when the patriot returned from saving his country in the ranks of war, to plough, and reap, and gather in the fruits of his own peaceful fields.

Thoreau baked for his own hand, at his own will and pleasure. He was a republican of republicans—to whom not only courts and thrones were repugnant, but who, while he had no quarrel with his kind, sought to know the feelings of a wild man—alone with the marvellous hordes of lower animals whom he understood and loved, and who repaid him with their trust—alone with Nature as she came from the hands of her Maker. Thus Thoreau had steeped his rough bread-making in reflections which had lent it a hue at once primitive and solemn.

There was another man dubbed a baker, whether he would or not, nicknamed in wanton mockery because he could not furnish bread for his famished people; a shy, shrinking man, [Pg 277]not altogether without the dignity of the line of a hundred kings—of St. Louis himself, blended with the native dignity of innocent intentions in the midst of his weakness, and with the pathos of a martyr for the sins of his fathers and evil advisers, as he stood forward in the window of his palace, wearing the red cap of anarchy for the crown of sovereignty, while France heard him hailed, not as the monarch—not as ‘Louis le Desiré,’ but as ‘Louis Capet, the Baker.’

There was still another figure engaged in the homely occupation that rose up then in the Friarton bakehouse. He had been introduced to Oliver and to thousands more in the president’s speech at the close of one of the Royal Society’s meetings. Oliver was not intimately acquainted with the man, as the hero when he had passed from this world was happily to be rendered familiar to the whole reading public. But the miller and baker of [Pg 278]Friarton—a distinct specimen of his kind—had got from the president’s speech a general idea of that other master baker, and rejoiced and gloried in him.

Oliver did not himself possess genius, yet he had some of its wide sympathies, keen intuitions and susceptibilities, and strong beliefs. Had the less gifted man known the greater Oliver would have prized highly the manly self-respect and modesty, even the odd gruff bearing, which was only the prickly husk to the sweet kernel with its milk of human kindness and juice of a fine, genial humour, which no general misconception, no bitter adversity, could sour. Oliver would have gone a pilgrimage—for he, too, had his boundless enthusiasm—to that obscure little northern bakehouse, where an intellectual and moral giant toiled single-handed and fared frugally amidst his inspired drawings of cherubim and seraphim, ape and Greek boy. Oliver [Pg 279]Constable could not have pretended to match his brother-tradesman’s profound, patient studies in natural science, or the royal bounty which disposed of the geological and botanical specimens—so painfully, and yet with such deep satisfaction and noble exultation, chiselled from the rock and plucked from the moor. After they had been laboriously and lovingly assorted and preserved, these specimens, together with the deductions carefully and warily drawn from them, were lavished with princely liberality on men of science, for whom they might win name and fame, while the real conqueror of the spoils was content to remain ‘Dick the Baker,’ drudging at a trade which was unremunerative to him, unknown and unhonoured, so far as the mere tinsel of worldly distinction and applause was concerned. And through it all Dick, who was the reverse of a morbid, fantastic misanthropist, would have preferred a certain amount of material prosperity [Pg 280]to the slow poverty which ground him to death at last, with the honest human fear of debt and starvation. He would have liked in his early manhood to have met with such a degree of comprehension and fellow-feeling from his neighbours as might have saved him from being quickly driven back on his natural reserve, with his huge stores of kindliness, cheeriness, and wit, confined to the kindred at a distance from him, his one or two rarely endowed, occasional cronies, his simple old housekeeper, the young students who were welcome to his priceless instructions without a thought of a professor’s fee. But in the man’s lofty soul and poetic idealisation, which could exist along with exact knowledge, he was content, with something like scorn of being pointed out for any other distinction, to be known only—apart from a queer fish, and a half-cracked dour sinner—for what he still was, without prejudice or false shame, ‘Dick the Baker.’

[Pg 281]

There would have been a greater charm in the man for Oliver than what belonged to the simplicity and gladness which took every circumstance of his lot bravely and thankfully, singing over his baking trough, singing back to the roar of the waves of the Northern sea. His heartily admiring biographer has recorded Dick’s honest practice as a tradesman:—‘His quarter loaf always contained four pounds full, while the two-pound loaves of many of the other bakers were short by about four ounces. Cheating had the advantage over honesty of six per cent. on every loaf—a profit in itself, few weighing their bread and deducting the deficiency.’

At last Oliver’s mind rambled off to a comical recollection of his grandfather, the first Oliver Constable, miller and baker, of whom his grandson had very authentic information, in addition to a faint personal recollection. This Oliver had been enterprising and ambitious as [Pg 282]any founder of a race. He had gone from a country bakehouse to London, and served for a term there, in order to be taught what might be the metropolitan mysteries and perfections of the trade. He had certainly attained the power of concocting a certain pudding, which was long held in high estimation in Friarton. The old Oliver, his wife, children, and kindred a little farther removed, had piqued themselves on this acquirement, and in order to keep it a private inheritance, had shrouded it in a captivating secresy. Even in family conclave, when there was an annual friendly gathering and festival in the baker’s house each Christmas, and when the supper was crowned with this very London pudding, as a fitting compliment from the host to his guests, the rites of the piece of cookery were conducted not only with peculiar ceremony, but with closed doors. In the course of the evening, the hostess, having retired and seen that a collection of the necessary materials—eggs, [Pg 283]butter, milk, flour, fruit, and spices, was complete, and without flaw, ranged in her own back kitchen, returned to the company, and asked her husband with brief significance, ‘Goodman, are you ready?’

The head of the house—a man of solid gravity both of body and mind—then withdrew with quiet importance from the circle of his friends for the space of half-an-hour. The prevailing standard of manners exacted that nobody should remark on the retirement of the entertainer for the good of the entertained, though it was fully comprehended that he had thrown off his company coat, donned his professional apron, and was then whisking eggs and beating butter in solitude, as the highest proof of his hospitality. The result figured at the banquet, and then all tongues were loosed in praise of the dish and its maker.

Why not? Perhaps old Oliver Constable’s exercise of his professional skill in the middle [Pg 284]of his season of recreation, was a greater sacrifice to friendship, and not more of an act of vanity, than is the preparation of a salad or a sauce by the amateur hands of a modern host or hostess.

As Oliver shook off the flour, and put on his coat again, Webster lounged into the bakehouse, and stopped short, bewildered, staring hard at the empty board and the baker who had just quitted it.

‘Webster, it is not in the fitting order of things that I should be under the necessity of doing your work,’ said Oliver, whose temper had got time to cool; ‘I have warned you before, and you have paid no heed. The connection between us had better come to an end. I give you your leave.’

‘As you please, sir; from this moment if you like,’ said Webster jauntily.

‘Very well. I take you at your word,’ said his master.

[Pg 285]

Oliver was inclined to make an example—if it can be called an example among servants, whose turn has come to carry matters with a high hand, and dictate terms to their masters. Let us hope that the new masters will be magnanimous, and not abuse their power, to a still greater extent than was done by the old, else the present dead-lock would never have arisen.

But Oliver was not aware—whether or not the knowledge might have swayed him—of the combination of circumstances which rendered Webster’s dismissal a severe blow to the man, in spite of his bravado, at a crisis in his affairs. The restless, factious baker had been keeping company with a girl slightly above him in station, whose relations, especially her father—a thriving master-builder, of punctilious and conservative views—did not by any means admire in his prospective son-in-law the hectoring tone, and the free and easy ways, which, along [Pg 286]with considerable force of will and cleverness at his trade, as at other things, had secured for Webster an ascendency among the other journeymen bakers, who were characterised for the most part by greater pliability and less ability. The principal score in Webster’s favour was his remaining in Mr. Constable’s service. It was this which kept Webster from being rejected with unhesitating severity by Keys the builder, and as an inevitable consequence of the summary dismissal, with tender regret, by pretty, gentle, Nelly Keys. For though Nelly had been greatly taken with her lover’s lordly swagger, she was too good a girl, and too dutiful a daughter, to act in direct disobedience to her father.

When Webster got his leave from Oliver, he knew it was all up with him and Nelly, to whom he was attached with the peculiar vehemence and self-assertion of his nature, though he put the best face on what he regarded as a [Pg 287]misfortune, if not a wrong, and braved it out at the first brush in the bakehouse.

And sure enough, Keys told Webster on the afternoon of the same day to keep the outside of the master-builder’s door for the rest of the journeyman baker’s stay at Friarton. The said master-builder had seized the opportunity of the first rumour of Webster’s quarrel with Mr. Constable to rescue his daughter from a future husband who had shown himself a breeder of mischief and instigator to rebellion, and was likely to end a noisy idle demagogue, a rolling stone that would gather no moss.

After trying in vain to soften the father, and next to obtain a private interview with the weeping Nelly, in order to drag from her a promise to stand by her lover, against her father and the whole world, Webster took refuge in a Friarton gin-palace, and continued there so long as to do still more deadly injury [Pg 288]to his cause. He was seen towards nightfall, in Friarton streets, drunk and disorderly, a long step for a tradesman who has hitherto been decorous in his cups, and who has not ‘gone on the spree’ like any shameless reprobate.

Another day intervened, during which Webster went here and there, unable, in spite of his boasted powers, to secure a second engagement in Friarton or its neighbourhood. Instead of getting rid of the fumes of rage and drink, he contracted still denser fumes of a similar description. As ill luck would have it, on the evening of the second day, when the man, always headstrong and violent, and now half-beside himself with disappointment, mortification, and Dutch courage, was on his way to the village at which Jim Hull’s nephew still kept together his country connection, Webster’s path took him past Friarton Mill, and at some hundred yards’ distance from the house, he [Pg 289]encountered his late master, taking a stroll in the autumn dusk, with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth.

Oliver was about to pass by his discarded baker with a brief ‘Good evening,’ when Webster brushed up against him, and delivered himself of a sneering, stammering proposal: ‘Let us have a little of your company, Mister Constable—take a walk together—not out of the way when you don’t object to fill my place in the bakehouse.’

Oliver saw the state the man was in, and sought to be quit of him without an unpleasant scene. ‘No; the arrangement would be rather different,’ he said coolly; ‘but I have no mind to discuss it. Get out of my road, man, or it will be the worse for you.’

The last sentence was provoked by Webster’s stumbling right across Oliver’s path, and standing unsteadily barring his farther progress.

[Pg 290]

‘So, Mister Constable, it was enough to meddle with my baking, and bully, and make short work of me, though you have not a word to say to me for the wrong done me—not a word as from man to man, when we meet like equals. Anyhow, the meeting-place is on a road as is free to both of us, and under the dark night which is going to come down, and cover both of us—and what one of us may choose to do to settle the question between us,’ said Webster incoherently and grandiloquently.

‘What should I have to say to you?’ demanded Oliver. ‘You broke faith as a servant, you were not in the bakehouse when it was your duty to me and the other men that you should be there. I simply did my duty as a master in turning you adrift, not without repeated notice beforehand of what must happen.’

Webster was not open to reason. He was brutal with unrestrained passion and distraught [Pg 291]with strong drink. He shouted the lie direct to Oliver, following the accusation of falsehood with a fierce curse and a furious blow.

Such things happen still, occasionally, in England, in spite of civilisation, propriety, and the rural police.

Oliver could have best parried the blow by a counter-blow, which, directed by a strong, steady, not untrained hand, would have laid the reeling assailant at the assailed man’s feet. But he had an objection to this aggressive mode of self-defence in which he was certain to come off conqueror, and in trying merely to parry the violent lunge made at him, Oliver entangled his long legs with those of his enemy, swerved, swayed, and fell, somewhat ignominiously, to the ground.

Webster, notwithstanding his half-furious, half-dazed malice, was still so much the creature of order, and of a peaceful if bragging past, as to take no advantage of Oliver’s lying [Pg 292]prone at the man’s feet and at his mercy for one decisive minute—the next, Webster uttered a crow of triumph, administered a not unnatural, but most unchivalrous kick to the shins of the antagonist struggling on his feet again, and meandered away in the gathering darkness.

Oliver stood wincing with pain, pulling himself together, and not believing his senses till he was forced to laugh at his own incredulity. He might have given chase to the fellow in the heat of the fray, since Oliver imagined any damage which he had received would have yielded, for the moment, to the fighting cock in him, while it ought to have been about matched by the enemy which Webster had put into his mouth, to steal away his brains and the right use of his legs.

Oliver could, with still greater ease, have called aloud, and reckoned with security on his call being heard as far as Ned Green’s and the other millers’ cottages, bringing him instant [Pg 293]assistance, which Oliver did not believe would have been withheld because of the disaffection common both to the mill and the bakehouse. Webster’s outrage had been too gross and included the chance of turning the tables, and effectually scaring many of the conspirators.

As it was, Oliver did neither. He laughed again, a little constrainedly, for that kick on his shins, though he had been accustomed to be mauled at football, and though this was almost a playful kick administered in the delirious inconstancy of Webster’s mind, had done its work with considerable effect.

After his short laugh Oliver began to reflect. ‘I must have hurt the rascal on some tender spot to reduce him to such excess of drink and madness in a couple of days. I gave credit to his pretensions and to Jim Hull’s dogmatic assurance that Webster would find another master sooner than I should another servant. Well, there’s nothing to be done at this time of [Pg 294]the day. It is utterly impossible now for him to make submission and agree to my terms, or for me to reinstate him in the bakehouse, but we may be no more than quits, although he should have contrived to crack my ankle-bone. How shall I manage to hop home, though Fan accuses me of a propensity to stand on one leg? And what am I to say to Fan and the world at large? A fall? It was a fall, but a jolly rum fall to produce such consequences.’

Yet Oliver had no further account to give of the accident, whether it were pride or magnanimity, or a mixture of both, which kept him silent. He would not condescend to a more particular explanation, though it was discovered in time that some of the smaller bones of his ankle had been fractured, and that because the injury had not been properly attended to at first—on account of his having choked down his suffering, and slurred over the amount of damage he had received—there [Pg 295]followed a protracted and painful imprisonment to the mill-house. And Oliver came out of it, and the accompanying illness, even though he had allowed a pair of learned physicians to be summoned to his aid, limping slightly for life on one ankle—if not on one knee like Horatius Coccles, as the culminating touch to his awkwardness.

The accident and its result, when the latter came to be fully known, excited some stir and talk in Friarton. Of course no ordinary fall on a level country road as smooth as a bowling-green, to a man in full possession of his wits and limbs, could have occasioned such a disaster. The marvel was, how Oliver Constable had fallen at all on the familiar and sure ground even in the uncertain light of gathering night, people commented with raised eyebrows. But doubtless it was his best policy to vouchsafe no details of this unaccountable fall. There could be hardly any question that it had occurred in [Pg 296]some discreditable scuffle or brawl with low companions. The speakers recalled the moonlight frolics of the young tradesmen, the time out of mind removal of lamps from honoured doors, the letting loose of a pig or two from their styes, with the wild attempt at inaugurating a boar-hunt in the streets of Friarton. Oliver Constable had been known to be present at these disgraceful performances, though he might have been charitably supposed beyond taking an active part in the idiotic riotous amusements. But innate low tastes, possibly a secret, wretched, craving for what was generally the stimulant to such uproarious behaviour, had certainly prevailed over the superficial refinement wrought by education.

Oliver Constable was likely to prove a dangerous tempter and corrupter in place of a fine model for his class to follow, and a bracing encouragement by way of example to the young men of the lower middle rank. He was a [Pg 297]proper fellow to mask his self-indulgence and license under the guise of philanthropy and unworldliness, to pose as a reformer! Here was a crying instance of a wolf in sheep’s clothing!

Mrs. Hilliard repeated the essence of the scandal to her cousin Catherine over their afternoon tea. Oliver Constable was coming out in the colours which might, perhaps, have been detected from the first, through the daubing done over them, by a man of the world. The accident which had fixed a permanent shamble on his gait, was said to have happened in a shocking drunken row.

It was symptomatic that there had been some time ago a split among the chapel people, with which Oliver Constable was mixed up. In general these splits were tokens of a disease peculiar to dissenting bodies, in which nobody outside dreamt of taking any interest. For that matter, nobody was likely to hear of the divisions unless from servants and tradespeople. [Pg 298]But for Oliver Constable, who ought to have been the chief pillar of the chapel, to be in bad odour with the members was too ominous to be passed over. Here was the end of foolish aspirations, of eccentricity, and not doing at Rome as the Romans did, but aiming at being hero or saint or a mixture of both. So Apollo and Caliban by turns had merged into Vulcan, who had been stealing very vulgar and unhallowed fire indeed when he met his fit punishment. Mrs. Hilliard was sorry for Fan—yes, she could spare sincere pity for Fan Constable at last.

Mrs. Hilliard told her tale with a curious mixture of regret and annoyance—since she had chosen to count kindred with the Constables—and of lurking satisfaction, because what she had said of Oliver’s high faluting, what she had prophesied as sure to follow transcendental ambition, had been borne out. She had called Oliver half Apollo half Caliban, she herself was [Pg 299]half a good-natured woman, half a mocking-cynic.

Mrs. Hilliard was stopped by Catherine. The cold statue became strangely warm, and instinct with life and emotion—red hot, actually gasping for breath in her indignation. ‘I wonder at you, Louisa,’ panted Catherine, ‘to listen to such wicked slander, to give credence to it for a moment, to put yourself on an equality with its fabricators, helping in its circulation. Oliver Constable is a good man, true as steel, pure as honesty itself, kind as a brother, though he may waste his fine qualities. I will pledge myself for his perfect innocence of anything so despicable and loathsome as hypocrisy—even if he were weak enough to be vicious and not as he is, too strong in his virtue to care for appearances.’

‘He does not lack an enthusiastic champion,’ observed Mrs. Hilliard, letting the corners of her mouth droop. ‘Take care, my dear, you are [Pg 300]not infallible in your convictions any more than the gentleman is in his conduct. The passion for being outré seems infectious. Ah! blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed. I have not been so wise as to be without expectation, though I have had my misgivings. Now I must confess, in spite of your looking daggers at me, I am disappointed in Oliver Constable. The sequel threatens to exceed so tremendously what I bargained for. I only anticipated a ludicrous collapse; I did not go in for a dismal wreck—at which I shall not be able to laugh, therefore you need not be angry with me,’ complained Mrs. Hilliard with a half-comical air of injury.

But Catherine was angry, in season and out of season, with the wrong as well as the right person. For how did this staunch champion treat Oliver the next time she met him, limping slowly down Friarton High Street? She passed him quickly with the slightest and coldest bow [Pg 301]that any of his defamers had yet administered to him. Mrs. Hilliard could no more have bowed in that fashion than she could have taken up a stone and thrown it at the culprit. It was the next thing to a cut direct, and it did cut Oliver to the heart, with the lively impression that Catherine Hilliard had listened to and believed the worst of the idle, senseless, shameful lies told of him.

As for Catherine, she was saying to herself in a fever of perverse, reproachful wrath and mortification. ‘What right had he who was so manly, courageous and steadfast to cast his pearls before swine till they turned and rent him: to spend himself in a manner and for a cause unworthy of the gift: to act so recklessly that he could be thus monstrously misjudged and maligned?’

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

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