FAN’S TRIUMPH.
‘Come along, Fan, to the front door, where the fellow has retreated.
Here is a fluke, but the sooner you deal with it the better; you must
spoil your breakfast, and have done with it. Harry Stanhope is as mad
as a hatter this morning, and nothing will bring him back to soberness
of mind save your giving him his _congé_ in so many words. This is
speaking plainly. Are you not amazed? I imagine you never apprehended
such a desperately moonshiny business from Stanhope, who’s in a general
way commonplace and matter-of-fact in his greenness. But come along, it
will not do to keep the young idiot waiting.’
‘But what if there are two of us as mad as hatters?’ said Fan, blushing
and brightening up like the white daisy when the red tips of its petals
catch the beams of the sun.
‘Fan, you cannot be so crazy, so weak to imbecility!’ cried Oliver,
incredulously; and then, as his unbelief began to be shaken by her
looks, still more than her words, he protested passionately on her
account: ‘A boy like Harry Stanhope! the merest boy in his fancies, as
you have had abundant proof; hardly responsible for his actions, not
fit to know his own mind, as sure to change as the wind.’
‘He is not so much younger a boy than you are, Oliver,’ said Fan, with
restrained spirit. ‘He is a little older than I am in years, and I
don’t feel so very youthful in spirit. I should be inclined to think I
was capable of knowing my own mind, and being held responsible for my
actions. But, no doubt, women are a great deal older, in proportion,
than men. You are all boys to us,’ said Fan, with demure motherliness.
‘I have even ventured to call a sage like you a boy.’
‘Fan,’ said Oliver, ‘don’t drive me beside myself. This is no occasion
for teasing, and I could not have believed you the woman to begin
to tease in such circumstances. I have been accustomed to think you
sensible, capable of self-respect, rather proud than meek. Have you
considered what sort of beggar Stanhope is, apart from his birth and
breeding, and the grace which they have given him. He is feather-headed
and an empty canister—if ever there were one. He has never thought
of anything save his own pleasure since he was born. He is incapable
of self-restraint, even if he knew the thing by name. He is the
incarnation of selfishness—genial and jolly now, I grant you, but
which will without fail grow coarser and harder with years. At forty
Harry Stanhope’s stupidity and self-indulgence will be palpable to the
shallowest intellect, and so may his grossness—even his brutality—if
his good angel do not interfere.’
‘His good angel will interfere. How dare you accuse and prophecy evil
of a better man than yourself—if humility and kindliness are better
than arrogance and harshness, as the Bible teaches?’
Fan stood at bay for her lover. ‘Harry is not a student or a scholar,
any more than I am by nature,’ she said more quietly; ‘but that
does not make him and me less of a man and a woman than if we were
a fantastic theorist and an abstracted visionary. If he thinks of
his pleasure, why not? when his pleasure has always been manly and
honest—and is not that to his credit, left to himself, to all intents
and purposes, as he has been? And it is not true that he cares only for
himself; he has been a good and true brother, as he will be good and
true in all the relations of life.’
Oliver groaned. ‘Do you know what the farmers, with whom he classes
himself, say of his conceited, childish enterprise? They lighten their
own troubles by guffawing over his muddles and messes. They say, “The
plough would need to turn up gold for Mr. Stanhope to reap a harvest,
even if times were as good as they are bad for agriculture.” They
calculate confidently he will have succeeded in making such a mull of
the business into which he has rushed, without a particle of knowledge
or experience, that he will be sold out and polished off in three or
four years at the farthest.’
‘The more need of the nearest and dearest of his friends to stand by
him,’ said Fan, with steadfast eyes.
‘His best friend will not be able to stand by him and defend him from
the ruinous consequences of the new habits he is grafting on the
old,’ maintained Oliver doggedly. ‘Harry Stanhope was known at Oxford
as one of the most careless and reckless of the undergraduates who
were his contemporaries. He was so unboundedly social that he was
never missing where company of any kind congregated. If he could not
get good, he could put up with bad. He was a regular frequenter of
village alehouses, as well as a conspicuous figure at every “wine”
within his reach. Now—country-town markets and the farmers’ circles in
commercial inns are his great resorts. To a man of Harry Stanhope’s
accommodating temperament, every company in which swallowing strong
drink is inseparably associated with friendly intercourse, must prove
playing with fire. God forbid that I should say the lad is cursed by a
fatal taint, but it will be next to a miracle in his case if the demon
is disappointed in getting possession of his victim.’
‘Oliver,’ said Fan, with bated breath in her anger, as she stood on the
hearthrug, confronting him, ‘who is it that did not care though he were
mixed up with the low larks of the shop lads of Friarton, so that even
respectable people could grow common liars and slanderers, taking it
upon them to say that he was sentenced to carry about in his person, to
his dying day, the mark of his degrading excesses?’
‘Let them say it,’ retorted Oliver, raising his head, quickly, and
without flinching; ‘that is another affair. The end may justify the
means, if some small love of fair play and poor humanity keep a man
true to his colours, through evil as well as good report; if his
conscience clear him, and they who ought to know, are satisfied he
is falsely accused. But only charity on the brain can regard Harry
Stanhope as bitten by a rabid regard for his kind, or for anybody save
himself, and perhaps his second self Horry.’
He tried her on other grounds. ‘How can you take it upon you to be
a farmer’s wife, Fan? How can you pretend to acquirements which you
never possessed, which you have never so much as tried to gain? You
have always had the strongest prejudice against the position of a
tradesman, and I take it you cannot put a yeoman on a much higher
level. Your ambition, which you did not conceal, was to lead the life
of a conventional lady.’
‘I was silly,’ said Fan, composedly. ‘I did not know what a gentleman
could do, and yet retain his gentle bearing unimpaired. I never met a
true gentleman—forgive me, Oliver—till I saw Harry Stanhope. I will
learn all farmhouse work that a farmer’s wife can do, for the sake of
my farmer, to help him to conquer fortune, more quickly than I learned
lessons at school to fit me to be your companion. I am not afraid to
say that I will be a good farmer’s wife—behind none in the country.’
Fan pledged herself proudly, and Oliver knew the pledge would be
redeemed, though Fan died for it.
‘Are you willing to enter a family, every member of which will look
down on you, if one of them own you at all, which I very much doubt?
Can you not open your wilfully closed eyes enough to see that Horace
Stanhope has not come here of late with his brother?’
‘Oliver!’ said Fan with flashing eyes, ‘you are seeking to pique me
by an objection which you must know does not exist in connection with
Harry. He has no people with claims on him. He has no friends who
would consider his welfare before any good to themselves, save me and
his brother—who has not gone against him, and surely the more reason
we should not forsake him. Did not Harry break off from his uncles
and aunts when he became a farmer? They allowed him to follow his own
course, and they must accept the consequences. “If they cut it up
rough,” as he says, “they have themselves to blame for it,” when they
consented to what was likely to happen, if he and Horry became yeomen.
Poor Horry, he would be as jealous as a woman of any other woman’s
coming between him and Harry!’ said Fan, with a little laugh and blush;
‘but I will help him to get over it for Harry’s sake: he is waiving
his objections already. The worst of it is, I am not just such a girl
as Agneta, with whom the poor dear fellow was always sparring, so that
Harry had to come in with his sweet temper, and reconcile the two. But
do you imagine that I find fault with Horace Stanhope because he would
not count any woman beneath the rank of a duke’s daughter, who was not
beautiful as the day, and an angel of virtue, deserving of Harry? There
would have been the old search over again, if the devoted soul had been
consulted:
‘Where is the maiden of mortal strain
May match with the Baron of Triermain?
‘It is little you know of things, Oliver, though you are a
philosopher, if you think that would have made me angry with Horry,
who will soon forgive me, because of the sympathy between us. Besides
Horry, there is only Agneta who is really interested,’ said Fan, after
an instant’s pause, ‘and she is my friend.’
‘It remains to be seen how far the friendship will stand this test!’
said Oliver with gloomy scepticism. He was so exasperated as to add a
taunt, for which he was sorry the moment after he had uttered it. ‘Why
don’t you admit frankly that you are besotted enough to believe the
whole race of Vere de Vere will open their arms to receive you into
their castles? That must be the real inducement to form such an insane
connection—not the cheap merits of a lad like Harry Stanhope.’
‘If you think so badly of me, Oliver, even though I may have given you
some cause by being foolish and worldly-minded, I cannot help it!’
said Fan, deeply wounded and offended.
There was no more to be said. Harry Stanhope must not be kept kicking
his heels in the mill-house court a moment longer. As Harry had calmly
stated at an early stage of the contest, Oliver could not prevent his
sister from making her own choice of a husband: she was of age, she
was mistress of herself in every way, including the disposal of her
little fortune. With respect to that, Oliver had been more just to
Harry Stanhope than her brother had shown himself to Fan. Oliver had
not attributed mercenary motives to the lad, as the person who ought to
have known her best had fastened upon Fan the all-powerful promptings
of a vain and small ambition. Oliver was quite aware that men of the
class to which Harry belonged are often as good arithmeticians as the
huxterers whom the gentlemen despise. The sons of the most ancient
and noble families, having the bluest blood in their veins, will
look out for ‘tin’ with their wives, even though the suitors have to
descend into mercantile walks and put up with plebeian antecedents,
in order to secure the indispensable metal, as unblushingly as the
northern farmer sought ‘prupitty’ with his daughter-in-law. Perhaps the
young patricians may plead the obligation of necessity in the cases
of all save the heads of their houses. The eldest son has his future
secured; but if he has unfortunate younger brothers, it may reasonably
be said—in spite of the gentlemanly professions provided for them,
which, when it comes to that, for the most part imply the spending
rather than the earning of money—they cannot dig, and to beg they are
ashamed. But Harry was not of this stamp, though he may have used their
slang in conversation. His mortal enemy could not accuse him of being
calculating. His defects, however flagrant, were free from mercenary
meanness.
Oliver looked upon himself as compelled to yield a formal outward
assent, in contradiction to the inward protest, to Fan’s right in the
selection of a mate.
Therefore, there was no open rupture in the little family. Harry
Stanhope, after his momentary spurt of anger, only laughed at his
future brother-in-law’s manner of receiving his first overtures, and
at Oliver’s way of conducting himself in the later arrangements. In
Harry’s eyes, Oliver’s behaviour was in keeping with the grumpiness
which the young aristocrat had always imputed to his democratic senior.
It was part of the _rôle_ of a radical, which Harry conceived Oliver to
be.
Harry could afford to treat the matter lightly; neither did Oliver,
after the first pang of painful surprise and bitter disappointment,
wish to quarrel outright with Fan’s bridegroom. Thus the two preserved
a truce; though they fell off, rather than drew closer, in whatever
friendship had hitherto existed between them, in the prospect of their
nearer alliance. Oliver turned over Harry entirely to Fan, as, no
doubt, he might have done in any circumstances, unless the young fellow
had been Oliver’s chosen chum and mate as well as Fan’s.
Fan smothered the keen regret called forth by her brother’s unshaken,
inveterate hostility to the marriage he could not hinder, and to the
gulf deepening between them, as best she might.
In every other light Fan’s lot was a triumph. For she had never
been mercenary, any more than Harry had been. She had been aspiring
in a sense, with a craving for superficial refinement, as somehow
representing to Fan the far deeper refinement and nobility of nature,
of which the surface polish—however becoming in itself and pleasant
to encounter—is by no means the inseparable accompaniment; and for
pure love of Harry Stanhope, Fan was prepared to crush her individual
tastes. She was willing to be a poor man’s partner, to drudge as a
practical housekeeper, to toil after another fashion as the notable
wife of a lucky farmer, to forget her girlish dreams of bountiful ease,
culture, and elegance.
Fan had her bright, brief day both in a higher and a lower sense. She
enjoyed that short interval in which a woman is beside herself and
counts herself—not merely the happiest of women, but the only happy
woman in the world deserving of the name, because she has not only won
a heart in exchange for her own, but because this heart, subdued by
her power, is the heart of hearts to her, compared to which all other
hearts are little better than dross.
Fan had also the lower, but what was to her the genuine and natural
gratification of being conscious that those of her neighbours on
whose opinions she had been wont to set store, having arrived at the
unanimous conclusion that Fan Constable had done well for herself,
became suddenly moved to change their chorus of condemnation to a
chant of glorification. The Fremantles and Wrights proved themselves
no more mercenary than Fan and Harry. The magnates of Friarton had not
worshipped in fear and trembling a big burly image of mammon, but a
shadowy fetish of gentility. Fan Constable, whom the ladies and the
professional set now acknowledged to be the most charming ladylike
girl in the neighbourhood, would not be a farmer’s wife to them.
She would—since the inferior distinction merged and was lost in the
superior—be the wife of Harry Stanhope, grandson of Lord St. Ives,
nephew by marriage of Lord Mount Mallow. Accordingly these authorities
renewed their withdrawn attentions with an eager lavishness, in
striking contrast to the donors’ former cautious, stinted dole of
recognition. They betrayed the knowledge, which Fan shared, that it
would soon be her turn to pay them attention.
When Fan’s honours were fully fledged, she might have a share of the
liberty which was vouchsafed to her husband, granted to her. She might
skim the milk in her dairy, and gather the eggs in her poultry-yard,
even carry them in the skirt of her gown, as Agneta Stanhope had
carried them, without challenge. And if Harry had been the son and not
the grandson of a viscount, and thus only one degree instead of two
removed from a peerage, or if his father’s father had been a marquis or
a duke, who knows but that Fan might have been allowed to go on to milk
her cows and feed her calves—not in frolic?
Mrs. Hilliard was impressed by Fan’s promotion. ‘That girl Fan
Constable has proved her mettle with perfectly lawful weapons, for she
is too true a little Philistine to stoop to employ any other.’ Mrs.
Hilliard ate her leek before her cousin, and it was no small comfort to
Louisa Hilliard, in her state of mind at the moment, that Catherine was
next to nobody when eating a leek was in question.
‘Both of these Constables have used me ill, have got the better of
me—of us all.’ Mrs. Hilliard spoke ruefully for her. ‘Fan, with her
negative drawing-room and positive attitude, has been and gone and done
it under our very noses.’
‘Done what?’ enquired the only half-awake Catherine.
‘Distanced her competitors—the Houghtons, the head-master’s nieces; how
do I know how many? all who had entered for the prize. She has overcome
and trampled upon her foes, and carried off the chance which might have
been yours, my dear, only you sat still and missed it.’
‘Was Harry Stanhope my chance in life?’ enquired Catherine, opening
her weary eyes. ‘Have I missed my all in losing him? Well, I did not
flatter myself there was any great thing to look forward to in my
career, if a woman can be said to have a career, but I have been guilty
of the presumption of dreading (and do you know the dread gave a kind
of trembling interest to life?) that there might be greater losses to
encounter than that of Harry Stanhope’s handkerchief—not that there was
ever the remotest prospect of its being thrown at me.’
‘Catherine!’ and with the exclamation Mrs. Hilliard looked at her
cousin gravely for once, though her lively mind soon reverted to its
ordinary track. ‘You frighten me, and that is treating me still worse
than the Constables have treated me. My cousins, whom I owned, have
eluded my grasp, and got beyond me, the one floored and the other
crowned—alike disqualified for serving as food for my entertainment.
But I never asked you to entertain me’—Mrs. Hilliard assailed
Catherine, growing serious again—‘only to entertain yourself. And if
you cannot do it in any other way, I am tempted to wish I could approve
of a Protestant sisterhood for you. It might afford you a refuge when
the world makes you so tired that you seem in danger of falling down
under the load. I can lift it off myself with my little finger, but I
cannot with my two hands, and all my might, remove the burden from you,
poor child.’ The clear ring of Mrs. Hilliard’s voice had softened, and
there was moisture in the eyes usually so dry in their sparkle.
‘Never mind me, Louisa,’ said Catherine, roused to faint surprise and
reluctance to cause trouble. ‘I am only too well off, you know. I am
sickening—that is, if I am sickening—“of a vague disease;” I ought to
have to work for my bread—supposing bread is worth working for—yet
starvation must really be an unpleasant process to stimulate so
many people to frantic exertions in order to avert the catastrophe.
Protestant sisterhoods would not suit me, nor would Catholic nunneries,
though I think, of the two, I should prefer the last, as possessing a
respectable antiquity and consistency. But to enter either would be a
sham in me, since I really believe that the Son of God could help me
staying with you, as well as with any lady superior or abbess—that we
are as near heaven living in the world in which He lived, as when we
try in vain to get out of it. It would only be a change of yoke, and my
shoulders seem to be slimmer than other women’s,’ remarked Catherine
with a forlorn smile. ‘Besides, no sisterhood would receive a menagerie
with me—and whatever else I might be brought to resign, I do not see
how I could get on without a large small family of beasts and birds.’
‘Thank you for the implied compliment,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, recovering
herself with a laugh. ‘Catherine, you administer tonics, though you
won’t swallow them.’
When the time came for Mrs. Hilliard to offer the usual
congratulations, her hearty admiration of Fan’s prowess so influenced
the lady, that she presented the tribute cordially, and was entitled to
complain that Fan had no reason to receive it superciliously.
But Catherine was not merely languid in her felicitations, she stopped
short in them, and substituted an uncalled-for piece of condolence:
‘How dull it will be for you with Mr. Stanhope and his brother at
Copley Grange Farm, when you have been accustomed to solitude with
your own brother!’ looking at amazed, indignant Fan, with great
uncomprehending, commiserating eyes. ‘I hope you will not die of
_ennui_ after the first week. No, I don’t forget that Mr. Stanhope is
very fond of visiting, and you will have to visit a great deal with
him, but won’t that also be dreadfully fatiguing?’
The Polleys and Dadds were not behind the others with their ovation;
but, to Fan’s immense relief, she found she had established by this
last step such a distance between herself and her early associates
that they no longer even attempted to bridge it over. Fan Constable
had succeeded in passing out of their sphere. They wished her joy as
it were through Harry Stanhope, and they were as respectful in the
expression of their good wishes, as if the rank which she was so soon
to borrow from him already belonged to her.
Old Dadd refrained from a single joke, and was almost solemn in
alluding to the subject.
Mrs. Polley only bristled up to Oliver, and represented to him that he
would no longer be content to sit down in her back parlour, since he
might be making the round of all the castles in the kingdom in company
with his brother-in-law.
Jack Dadd actually called Fan ‘Miss Constable,’ unless in the strictest
privacy, among his most intimate cronies, or as a means of teasing the
Polley girls.
’Mily Polley did not propose to call on Mrs. Stanhope. ‘She is a cut
above us, now, and no mistake, when she’ll be going among his grand
relations—generals and admirals, and Lady This and Lady That, every
time he takes her up to town. I dare say the fine people will snub
her, but Fan Constable won’t mind that, since they can’t close their
doors against her, and she married to their nephew and first cousin;
and she’ll give as good as she’ll take, I’ll say that for her. She’s
never behind. But I tell you what, ’Liza, we’ll put our pride in our
pockets—what’s the good of letting it stand in our way? and come round
mother, and go to church instead of to chapel, the first Sunday after
Mrs. Stanhope has returned from her wedding jaunt. We’ll try if we
can’t get a wrinkle—as Jack Dadd says—out of her new bonnet. Only Fan
Constable does not know how to dress herself. Yet she has caught a
duck of a real gentleman, like Mr. Stanhope is, with her dowdy clothes,
and her plain sewing, and her whity-brown face,’ cried ’Mily, in
exasperation at the contradiction.
‘She had been his fate,’ said ’Liza, mysteriously.
‘You shut up, ’Liza, and don’t talk as if you believed in
fortune-telling—not that I should mind a bit getting my fortune told
by a right old woman, in a red cloak, with a pack of cards. It would
be lovely. And, oh my! wouldn’t mother be down on me, if she found me
out!’ cried ’Mily, in high glee at the bare idea of the servant girl’s
escapade.
‘It is an instinct of self-preservation on the fellow’s part, and on
Fan’s it is the old infatuation and the recent reaction working their
worst together. There is no help for it,’ said Oliver to himself,
slowly and sadly.
Beyond the area of Copley Grange Farm every voice of every Stanhope
was dumb on the announcement of Harry’s marriage. The members of the
Stanhope family certainly agreed with Oliver, that it was useless to
interpose from any hope of dealing effectually with the consummation
of Harry’s descent in life, to which his friends had formerly been
provoked into giving a reluctant consent.
At last Agneta wrote to Fan, very prettily, within certain limits.
Agneta was glad that her dear old Harry should be happy. She thanked
Fan for making his happiness. She trusted that she and Fan would always
remain friends. But there was not a word of Agneta’s coming down to
Copley Grange Farm to grace the marriage; not a hint of any future
visit; not a syllable of meeting Fan again in the whole course of their
respective lives.
Fan read the letter without any remark. As she read she grew still
more colourless in her olive paleness, which ’Mily Polley called
‘whity-brownness,’ but there was also a more steadfast set of her
well-cut mouth, a more indomitable expression in her brown eyes.
She did not give Oliver the letter to read; indeed, the brother and
sister were no longer on such terms as to volunteer an exchange of
confidences. She only surrendered the dainty epistle to Harry at his
special request.
Harry reddened and bit his lip as he took in, at a couple of glances,
the familiar writing on the page and a half of note-paper. ‘Dash it!
I did not think Aggie could have been such a cold-hearted chit,’ he
muttered; ‘I did think she was more of a lady than to be a stuck-up
snob.’
‘Never mind,’ said Fan, with determined magnanimity; ‘I dare say it is
hard for her to have you stoop for a wife.’
‘Stoop!’ protested Harry, who was loyal in his attachments, if he was
anything; ‘it is my first regular attempt at climbing since I got out
of the garret window at one of our tutors. I nearly broke my neck then,
but I have fallen on my feet this time. I have done the best stroke of
business I can ever hope to accomplish, though I should live to head
all the markets round with my heifers and south downs, and win the
prizes from the Prince and all the agricultural nobs in the country
at the show at Islington. Ask your brother who has the best of the
bargain in our blessed contract. It is all Aunt Julia’s doing. In her
aping of liberality and angling for popularity she is at heart the most
time-serving and intolerant old woman under the sun.’
‘Then it will be a victory indeed, if we can force her, and everybody
else with her, to come round to our side at last,’ said Fan, fired by
her dauntless courage.
There was not more than a grain of truth in Oliver’s cruel
accusation of what had led Fan to listen to Harry Stanhope. But
that fructifying grain, together with the passion of her love for
Harry, helped the unimaginative, rational young woman to rear an airy
structure—representing her ultimate relations with the Stanhopes
and the great world. There was Harry encouraged, aided, ‘kept up to
the scratch,’ by his wife’s proud and loving support in all manly
energy and perseverance in his profession. There were his name, fame,
and fortune established, as the most enterprising and successful
gentleman-farmer in the country. (Fan paid no heed to the signs of the
times or to impending agricultural distress, in her dream). There was
the reappearance of the Hartleys on every rumour of a fresh election,
with John Hartley, thankful to accept Harry Stanhope as an ally on
equal terms, with Lady Cicely, who had once demurred at the possibility
of Fan’s accompanying her brother to dine at Copley Grange, pleased
to drive over with her husband, and dine herself at Copley Grange
Farm. Of course, that must be after the old farmhouse was added to and
improved, so as not to be altogether ill-matched with the manor-house.
If the _entrée_ to the manor-house were secured during the Hartleys’
temporary occupation of Copley Grange, it would almost certainly remain
free to the Stanhopes when Mr. Amyott resumed his permanent reign. The
example of the Stanhopes’ landlord would be followed by other squires
whose houses were within visiting distance of the Farm.
Fan, in her chrysalis state, had often looked from the mill side of
the Brook across to the park and great house, with its dignified blot
of an Italian façade. She had fancied how bountiful and gracious life
must be there, contrasted with life in the back shops and parlours
of the Polleys and Dadds. But she had felt then that if by virtue of
Oliver’s genius and scholarship she ever rose to cross the threshold
of such an Eden of refinement and culture, its roses would be full of
thorns for her, simply because she would not be, like the daughters
of that privileged region, to the manner born. Innately she was a
lady, but outwardly she would blunder and flounder in the labyrinths
of precedence and etiquette, or amidst the appalling topics of sport,
horses and wines, from all acquaintance with which her sex, alas! did
not exempt a woman of the higher orders. Fan would cause flippant
waiting-maids to titter, and staid butlers to frown, at her mistakes.
Now all this was changed. When Fan should procure the ‘Open, Sesame!’
to the charmed houses by so strange a process as that of becoming a
yeoman’s wife and doing a yeoman’s wife’s work, all her troubles would
be at an end. Harry had been born to the purple, and he would always be
at hand to give involuntarily the cue which she would take as quickly
as ever King Cophetua’s beggar-maid borrowed lustre from her royal
husband, and developed without loss of time into a right queenly lady.
Fan would not wear sparkling diamonds or sumptuous velvet, indeed, but
she had never cared for jewels or fine clothes or luxury. What she
had cared for she would attain, the simple elegance of bearing and
behaviour of a gentlewoman, by art as well as by nature.
In the meantime, while these chickens were unhatched, Friarton took it
as a matter of course that Harry Stanhope’s kindred should begin by
looking coldly on the projected alliance between Copley Grange Farm and
Friarton Mill, and did not think of deposing Fan from her pedestal as a
bride because she was subjected to this ordeal.
One relative came forward before the knot was tied, and accepted
Fan—not simply as an inevitable misfortune, but as a member of the
illustrious family of Stanhope. The next time Harry came to the Mill,
after Agneta’s note had been received there, he was not only attended
by his second shadow; a voice, which had been hitherto dumb, spoke.
Horace managed, with his surly awkwardness—which was something
quite different from Oliver Constable’s awkwardness—and his bilious
ungraciousness, even in conferring a compliment, which made it seem as
if a good-natured impulse went entirely against the grain with him, to
propose himself as Harry’s groomsman. ‘If you don’t mind, if no other
body will serve Harry’s purpose, and help to turn him off,’ he said to
Fan in the voice, the tone of which was out of tune and grating, unless
sometimes when he addressed his brother.
Fan had never smiled so sweetly on Harry in the whole course of his
wooing, as she now smiled on the grudging, unjoyous groomsman, who,
sure enough, was to be Harry’s servant, not hers. ‘Oh! I am glad and
grateful that Harry’s oldest and best friend is to stand by him on his
marriage day,’ she said audibly to the dull ears. ‘I know you are not
thinking of me, and I do not wish you to think of me—I only say this to
express, though you may not care to hear, what an obligation and honour
you are conferring on me by acting as Harry’s brother still. But it is
so, Mr. Horace’ (she had not begun to call him by his Christian name,
just as he had never called her anything save ‘Miss Constable.’ She was
in some apprehension that ‘Miss Constable’ would not even pass into
‘Mrs. Stanhope’ with Horace). ‘I will never forget your kindness to
Harry,’ she finished.
He looked at her for a moment with an impulse of furious displeasure
added to his ordinary gruff, sardonic mood, as if he questioned her
right to thank him for Harry, and bade her be wary of taking so
much upon her. Then her tender tact penetrated the thick skin of his
jaundiced, warped nature. ‘All right, Fan,’ he said, touching her hand
and dropping it again, and giving what exacting, fastidious people
might have classed as a ghastly grin. But from that date Fan was
happily convinced that though she was a very small person compared to
Harry in his brother’s eyes, Horace had forgiven her on the spot, and
taken her, for all time to come, into a humble corner of the chamber of
his affections, since she had shown herself capable of comprehending,
in a degree, what the brothers were to each other, and would never seek
to separate them. Thus Harry Stanhope’s lovers and slaves became sworn
allies, and not vowed adversaries.
The hard lines were for Oliver. It was all very well for Sally Pope
to cackle that now Miss Fan had got her will, and she wished the
young mistress well, neither was it any harm to speed her going, for
marriage was the best lot that could befall most young women, and she
would ‘fettle’ Master Oliver—see how comfortable she would make him, in
all the old homely ways, like a king with his faithful housekeeper.
Oliver had no doubt Sally would make his body comfortable, but what of
the refreshment of his mind and heart now that his father was dead,
when his only sister—the little Fan of other days—alienated from him
already, should have left him in order to make a foolish _mésalliance_
of which no good could come? Friarton Mill in its sweet domestic beauty
would be robbed of its chief attraction so soon as Fan was gone.