‘THE DEVIL SHALL NOT HAVE HARRY.’
The three years allotted by his brother-farmers for Harry Stanhope to
run through what small patrimony he had invested in Copley Grange Farm,
and what credit he had begun upon, did their work more effectually than
the months given by Oliver Constable for Harry to tire of his part as a
yeoman.
Fan had held her husband back with a little hand which was like a
vice for staunchness, but which had, at last, loosened its grip under
overwhelming pressure.
Horace had thrown his passive dead weight in the way, to impede Harry’s
swift progress to ruin.
Oliver Constable had not stood aside in sulky neutrality, or hard
inflexibility flavoured with vindictiveness, to witness the fulfilment
of his predictions. He would have given much for them to prove false.
He did all he could to prevent their realisation. He had little in
common with his brother-in-law, and it was in the characters of the two
men to grow always more apart instead of nearer to each other. Still
Oliver, though he was not much in Harry Stanhope’s company, and though
Harry showed himself constantly more restive, under any influence which
Oliver had ever possessed over him, tried his best in the thankless
office of looking after Harry, when he was beyond his wife’s scope, and
of interposing to save him—not merely from the consequences of his own
folly, but from falling a victim to his neighbours’ weaknesses. As a
result of this knight-errantry on Oliver’s part, there was an entire
rupture between him and Jack Dadd on Harry’s account.
Harry Stanhope’s incapacity for drawing distinctions—moral as well as
social—his vanity and passion for popularity, had all pointed with
tolerable clearness to one conclusion from the first. He had no notion
of what was expedient. He was not particular in his easygoing fashion.
He was bound to turn soon from his self-imposed obligations, selected
very much at haphazard, and sitting with the greatest lightness upon
him. He must have excitement of some kind, at any cost.
The upper, and, to be fair, the more decorous, set in Friarton,
which had commenced by being delighted with their opposite in Harry
Stanhope’s _abandon_, matched as it was with his gentle birth and
breeding, ceased to prize his company when they found it was bestowed
on their social inferiors with a thousand times the lavishness
and indiscriminateness which they had severely censured in Oliver
Constable. And all the time Oliver had claimed a right to act as he
did, and asserted a principle in it, while he had shown a method in
his madness. In the course of the last three years, he had brought his
accusers to acknowledge that, though he had lost himself in the matter
of his money, talents, and education, with the desirable position which
they might have commanded, he was not a reprobate, and he had known
when to stop long before the climax of individual degradation.
As Harry Stanhope ceased to be the idol of the gentlemen and ladies,
he became also less of the pet and more of the butt of the lower grade
into which he was increasingly thrown. The young farmers and tradesmen
with whom he fraternised, not only at market and in cricket-matches and
games of bowls, but on every occasion, public and private, still looked
up to him in many things, and copied him—not always to their benefit,
but a stronger tincture of contempt was getting infused into their
liking.
This was especially true of Jack Dadd, who, while he continued proud
of being hand-in-glove with Harry Stanhope, did not scruple to make a
cat’s-paw of his friend, and rather enjoyed leading him into a scrape
and leaving him there. This disloyalty and shade of baseness did not
spring necessarily from Jack’s class or calling, and they had still
less to do with his natural good temper. They belonged to long-standing
class feuds and the lingering spite thus engendered. It was almost
inevitably wreaked on a person who, however ready to forget social
prejudices, sprang still from the privileged order.
Oliver humbled himself in the room of Harry Stanhope, and through Harry
in the place of Fan, to remonstrate with Jack Dadd.
‘You are older than Stanhope, Jack,’ Oliver reminded his quondam
friend, who had bragged earlier of their friendship, ‘and you were not
brought up in the very odour of thoughtlessness.’
‘So I suppose I ain’t fit to go about with your gentleman
brother-in-law, unless as his keeper. “Not if I know it;” “Not for
Joe,”’ interrupted Jack, rudely and flippantly. ‘I ain’t so fond of
being a fellow’s keeper, as you are, Constable, though you don’t seem
to like to try it on Harry Stanhope. I thought you had got a lesson and
rid yourself of such priggishness, long ago. It ain’t a compliment to
Stanhope to make out he’s not fit to take care of hisself, or to choose
his company and be on equal terms with them. Lord! it was a funny sort
of equality last night when I cut my stick, just as he was challenging
the stableman at the “Wheat Ears” to box with him, Dummy being to hold
their jackets, I take it. Stanhope ain’t proud; I’ll say that for him,
neither when he’s as tight as a lord, nor when he’s as sober as a
judge—which don’t often happen now-a-days. It comes to this, Constable,
I’ve had enough of your sauce of dictation. There was not so much
difference between that and your sister’s airs, and a fine pass they’ve
brought her to: got her a gentleman for a husband, no doubt—and, what
is more, he’s worth the two of you; but he’s made her work for him so
as keeping a shop would have been a joke by comparison, and he’ll kick
the causeway all the same.’
After that conversation there was an end to friendly intercourse
between Oliver and Jack, and to any fond hope which the former had once
been so conceited as to entertain, of swaying his brother-tradesman to
higher aims.
Harry Stanhope’s deterioration in every respect included his inveterate
idleness in all pursuits which did not take the form of sport or
frolic, while ploughing, sowing, cattle-feeding, even hay-making
and reaping, when they ceased to be novelties, ceased also to be
sport or frolic, lost every element of interest and amusement, and
became positively repugnant to the man who remained always a boy.
He neglected his farming utterly, or made wild havoc with it in his
fitful, reckless operations, forced sales, and consequent desperate
losses.
With all this wanton waste Fan had nothing to do. She had accomplished
wonders in the _rôle_ she had undertaken. Her dairy produce and poultry
were from the first among the best in the neighbourhood. She competed
successfully with those farmers’ wives who were either nothing save
dairymaids and henwives, or who employed experienced servants to
do their mistresses’ work by proxy. Any prizes which agricultural
societies awarded to the tenants of Copley Grange Farm were for its
mistress’s butter and cheese, goslings and turkey poults.
And all the time Fan was not a dairymaid alone, she was a gentleman’s
wife deserving of the name. In order to unite the contrasting
attributes, she rose up early and lay down late, and ate the bread
of carefulness. She changed her dress as often as any fine lady who
has nothing to do, no occupation or pleasure in life save dressing
herself by the help of a maid. Fan was rewarded when Harry noticed the
freshness of her calicot morning gown, the daintiness of her afternoon
piqué, the good taste of her evening grenadine.
Neither Harry nor Horace had an idea of gardening beyond sticking a
spade into the ground once in the course of the spring and leaving it
there after a quarter of an hour, or gathering an occasional handful of
strawberries, while the cook demanded a regular supply of vegetables,
and the masters missed seasonable fruit when it was not forthcoming,
appearing to expect cherries, peaches, and pears to drop from the skies
like manna. Fan read garden chronicles alternately with dairy manuals,
and spent many a fatiguing hour of her early married life striving to
direct the labours of an improvised gardener drawn from the ranks of
the field workers. It was as much out of the question for Harry to keep
a skilled gardener as it was for Fan to set up a qualified housekeeper
and an experienced dairymaid, though Harry would have attempted it
without a doubt if he had been suffered. But Fan stinted herself
of all other worthy assistants, because a good cook and a trained
table-boy who could cater for the two young men and wait upon them as
they had been used to be waited upon, became absolutely necessary to
the Stanhopes, as soon as their establishment at Copley Grange Farm
acquired a settled character, and ceased to partake of the nature of
living for a time _al fresco_, or _in villeggiatura_.
When Fan became painfully conscious that she had not only her own
arduous double and treble duties to attend to, she must also supply
deficiencies on Harry’s part, she rose to the occasion gallantly.
She added agricultural journals, treatises on husbandry, essays on
farm stock, to her other diligent studies. She crammed herself; she
sought to coach Harry. She tired herself to death and exposed herself
to innumerable catarrhs and coughs wandering over the fields in all
kinds of weather, to win him, by her close sympathetic companionship,
to go among his men, or else to show them, in his interest, that there
was the eye of a mistress, if not a master, on their work. She drove
with Harry and Horace to the markets, and if it had not been to spare
Harry’s dignity as a yeoman and his credit as a man—since poor Fan had
a double object and a double terror in accompanying her husband to the
towns—she would willingly have stood with him in the streets and the
corn exchanges and sat with him at the inn tables. And if Fan could
have been ten women instead of one, she might have saved Harry Stanhope
from worldly destruction, as Mrs. Polley had rescued her husband and
children. The two women did not resemble each other much in other
respects, and there was little love lost between them. But they shared
at least the helpfulness, command of resources, and capacity for brave
effort and endurance, of the women of the trading classes—the women who
have not been spoilt, and have not lost the instincts of energy and
enterprise, and with it the most distant resemblance to the virtuous
woman in Proverbs. This was part of Fan’s inheritance as a tradesman’s
daughter, which she had neither guessed nor valued as it deserved.
It is a fact established by experience that many women, both widows
and spinsters, have made, when the opportunities offered themselves,
good and successful farmers. Fan was a clever woman apart from
book-learning; she was a woman of strong resolution, and she was
stimulated and braced by every motive which she held dear. If a single
mortal woman could have redeemed Harry Stanhope’s fortunes, she would
have redeemed them.
But the one woman must certainly have been ten, and Fan could
not multiply her identity or render herself ubiquitous. She was
tremendously overweighted—not only by the whole burden and anxiety of
the farm’s being cast upon her, who ought to have been treated as the
weaker vessel, but by the unnerving, despairing suspicion—deepening
every day into hopeless conviction, that an impending wreck of other
than worldly goods was to be faced and wrestled with. Harry was—in what
became always more imminent and hideous danger—of being as speedily and
utterly swamped in tastes, opinions, habits—all that constitute moral
character, as in income and capital. In the dread and horror of that
final downfall, all other falls began to look light.
Fan ceased to pay the smallest heed to the fact that still there came
no recognition of her entrance into the Stanhope family save from
pretty, temporising, meaningless letters written by Agneta. The other
members coolly ignored the intruder. Mrs. Harry Stanhope had no concern
to spare for the consciousness that the little household at Copley
Grange Farm were not keeping their first footing, which had seemed to
be their birthright, among the upper ten of Friarton.
She did not even mind that the Polleys and Dadds grew loud in amazed
pity—in which, at the same time, she believed they revelled, over
her altered circumstances. Mrs. Harry Stanhope was not only reduced
to sending butter, cheese and eggs into the town for sale, she came
herself to the Polleys’ shop and the cheese shop, to square the
accounts which no one else at the farm could make out. Everybody knew
Harry Stanhope had turned out a gentle beggar and purely ornamental. He
could not afford to keep a bailiff to give the orders for which he was
so little prepared that his men continually laughed in their sleeves
at the instructions they received. The mistress of Copley Grange Farm
commanded no more help than she could get from a girl under twenty
in addition to the dairyman to manage the dairy and poultry-yard, on
which it was evident the principal dependence of the farmer must rest.
And did not the old Fan Constable look worn and pulled down, though
she might be proud and ‘game’ to the last, as Mrs. Harry Stanhope? The
truth was that when Fan was from home or in society without Harry, her
eyes had already acquired the fixed, abstracted look of eyes which are
looking beyond their present surroundings, and seeing in the distance
things invisible to her companions. Her ears were constantly on the
alert, strained to catch sounds inaudible to the rest of the party.
While she was taking her share in the conversation or the business
going on about her, there was a perpetual undercurrent of thought
and care in her mind which had no reference to the topics discussed.
She had great self-command, so that she could preserve a double
consciousness, but she was never at ease, never without trouble; and
the unresting worry beneath the calm and smiling surface, showed itself
in a haggard, aging look which was rapidly robbing Fan of all traces of
her youth.
One evening in spring, when the thrushes and blackbirds were
anticipating the nightingales and tuning their ’prentice notes in the
hedges—which had gained the purplish-red bloom, the herald of a flush
of green—over the primroses looking pale and cold in the raw wind of
the March twilight, after the golden shields of the celandines, which
had kept their neighbours company with quite an exuberance of jollity
in the morning sunshine, had collapsed, as early as the afternoon, into
small tightly wrapped-up balls, encased in dim green envelopes, Oliver
was startled by Fan’s walking like a ghost unexpected, unannounced,
and all alone, into the mill-house parlour.
It was too early in the season for evening strolls, and lately Fan
had never been seen abroad without her husband. The same could not be
said of Harry, who was often enough from home without his wife, and
not quite so frequently, but still with tolerably constant recurrence
during the winter, without his brother, whom he had learnt at last
to shake off imperiously. There had come to be an unnatural divorce
between light and shade, and day and night, neither faring well in the
separation. For Harry, all by himself, drove his chariot of the sun,
like another Phaëton, madly, and if he did not set the world on fire,
his own eyes grew scorched and bloodshot, his lips parched, his hands
palsied; the whole goodly springs of his manliness and kindliness were
dried up and polluted with ashes, because of the burden of consuming
fire he had laid hold of and would thenceforth try in vain to guide and
control.
As for Horace, he would slink away like a dog summarily dismissed by
his master, withdraw into his corner to sit moodily there, and only
start up on the distant sound of Harry’s clogged instead of winged
footsteps. Oliver had seen Horace and Fan exchange furtive, miserable
glances when Horace returned thus alone, and drew back into the
greatest gloom which the little drawing-room afforded him. Then the
pair would sedulously pretend to read and work while in reality their
ears were on the stretch, and their hearts on the rack, till far on
into the night. These two knew and trusted each other thoroughly by
this time, though Oliver was certain the looks never passed into words.
Wife and brother remained too loyal in their allegiance.
As Oliver rose hastily to bid Fan welcome, he saw more plainly than
he had yet seen it, and with a sharp pang at the sight, the change in
her looks. A small woman to begin with, she was now little more than
skin and bone. Her brown eyes appeared a sombre black, set in great
shadowy hollows in her white face. The straight firm line of her lips
was drooping and quivering. She put her thin hand in Oliver’s and held
up her face to be kissed, and spoke without any preamble. ‘I am beaten,
Oliver. They say an Englishman never knows when he is beaten, but that
is a man, not a woman. Yet did you ever think I would give in with
life? and I have given in. I have come to you, not to save me—you tried
that once and failed. What did it matter if I might have saved another?
only I have not—there’s the rub. I don’t mind myself, and you need not
mind me. But you must do something. I tell you, Oliver, you must move
heaven and earth to save Harry.’ Her voice rose into a little weak cry.
She was like a creature who had lost all command over herself.
But it was not so much this reversal of natural law in a woman—by
organisation and courage, self-sufficing, self-restrained, rational
and resolute—which smote Oliver Constable with dismay and compunction,
as if he had been the sinner whose sin was at the bottom of this
spectacle, the most pitiable he had ever beheld. It was some
comprehension of what Fan must have suffered, of what it had cost
this woman—ardent and steadfast as women even more than men can prove
themselves—to own herself beaten, to grovel as it were at his knees,
and fling herself for help on him of all men, who, though he had been a
brother in more than name, had interposed with all his might, without
effect, as both of them were well aware, to turn her from the step
which had brought her to this pass.
He remembered having, more than once in their lives, angrily accused
her of being incapable of changing her mind; and—knowing as he had
seemed to know her high spirit, unquenchable energy, and unswerving
determination—he had been tempted to believe, against right reason,
that however mistaken and misplaced her aspirations, or foolish and
baseless her dreams, Fan could not be baffled, and would not be
vanquished.
The end of all was, that she was more thoroughly subdued, presenting
a more deplorable object of contemplation, than if she had been a far
feebler woman.
‘My God!’ cried Oliver in his heart—moved as he was to its depths when
a believing man can but appeal to the Father of his spirit; ‘what must
she not have borne to crush her whole being, lay her pride in the dust,
extinguish the last spark of hope, and break her heart?’
The next moment Oliver was briskly administering to Fan, as most
people in his position, at their wits’ end what to do for the best,
would have administered it, a cold douche—first on the suppliant,
whom he would fain have taken into his arms and sheltered from every
farther blast of the stormy wind which had cast her down bleeding and
powerless, to implore mercy for another and not herself—and next on her
agonised petition.
‘Nonsense, Fan, you are over-wrought, my dear; your nerves are
unstrung; you do not know what you are saying.’
But the time for pulling herself together, struggling to her feet, and
staggering on with the veil drawn decently down again over her torture
and her faintness, was over for Fan. ‘I do know what I am saying,
Oliver,’ she insisted with ashy lips, while the hand which clutched his
arm was trembling like a leaf. ‘You think a wife should not drop the
slightest hint of the skeleton in her closet. I will agree with you
here. And I have not breathed a word to any other human being—not to
Horry, who is his second self—only to you; and do you suppose I could
have spoken to you unless in the last extremity, which has come?’
‘Then rest satisfied with what you have done, Fan; say no more about
it,’ Oliver conjured her, as if he would have put his hand upon her
mouth to keep her from further utterance, or brought down the creeping
dusk to hide their faces from each other. He got up, took several turns
up and down the room, so that he might have his back to her when he
promised solemnly; ‘The devil shall not have Harry, so far as I can
help it.’
That Fan should have come to her brother with such a prayer on her
lips, was only less bad for him than for Fan herself.
Oliver Constable had not the most distant thought that Harry Stanhope
could have grossly ill-treated his wife. Oliver would as soon have
suspected Harry of lifting up his strong right arm to strike down
Horace unresisting under the pacific influence of his devotion. It
is your poor half-brutal coal-heaver who ordinarily adds kicks to
curses, where his wife is concerned. As a rule, though certainly not
without exceptions, centuries of refining civilisation and liberal
education remove Harry’s whole class from committing such outrages.
Harry Stanhope, with his graciousness in an entirely muddled condition,
might challenge a muscular ostler to a round in the noble art of
self-defence. He was known to have taken the law into his own hands and
knocked down a ruffian who was belabouring a child and insulting an old
woman. But he had probably hardly ever spoken a rough word to Fan, whom
he had held in the greatest respect ever since he had known her, though
she had become powerless to make a man of him, as he had proposed. She
was not silly, or bumptious, or trying in any way so as to provoke
the wrath which had originally been a rare experience with Harry. But
not the less he had slain her faith in him, by his hopeless levity
and folly, which were tending unmistakably to animal indulgence and
besotted excess. He had not destroyed one atom of her love—else Fan’s
heart too might have died within her in its cold emptiness, but, at
least, it would not have been wrung with the intolerable pang of loving
him to death and beyond death, yet seeing him go down, in spite of her,
to the place of dragons.
There are students of humanity who positively state that a good man
or woman’s love must inevitably perish with the loss of esteem. If
so, the best human love must be singularly unlike Divine love as it
is revealed to us. And it is one thing voluntarily to give love to a
creature whose repulsive moral disease is evident and undeniable, and
has already penetrated and poisoned the nature through and through—and
quite another to have loved the same creature in the beauty and glory
of sound mortal health, with but the seeds of fatal disease, only to be
detected by the wise physician, lurking in the system, and having once
loved to turn with loathing abhorrence and absolute rejection, from
the sick man, when his weakness has found him out, his sore ancestral
malady has laid fast hold of him, and he is fighting a desperate battle
for life or death.
Not only did Fan’s love cling to Harry in his social and moral decline
still more closely than when she had learned to love him in the heyday
of his natural gifts; even Oliver—who had early taken Harry for what he
was worth, and condemned him to his destiny, now in the teeth of what
he had done to Fan, felt the man’s heart within him turn and soften
with yearning and commiseration for the stripling who was so unequally
matched, and was standing foot to foot, reeling under the shocks
inflicted by a giant adversary and ghastly foe.
Oliver needed this compensation of human tenderness revived and called
forth in the heart of a benevolent man, by human weakness and peril in
its sorriest guise and direst strait, to help to make up to him for
the sacrifice he was called on to offer; since the world had not gone
well with Oliver Constable during these last years, and his own affairs
required the unremitting attention which he saw himself compelled, and
had pledged himself to Fan, to give to those of another.
Oliver had started on his mission impressed with the conviction that
it behoved him especially to make his business prosper, or, if he
could not do that, to prevent its becoming disastrous, in order to
remove the slur thrown liberally on Jacks-of-all-trades, geniuses,
and enthusiasts. He had not the slightest inclination to the modified
martyrdom of commercial losses for their own sake. He decidedly
objected to wasting the money which his father had carefully gathered
that Oliver’s career as a gentleman and scholar might be untrammelled,
even for a good object, if he could prevent it.
On the contrary, it was part of Oliver Constable’s duty, as he
conceived it, to vindicate the truth that the best citizenship and the
best Christianity did not, as a matter of course, conduct a diligent,
prudent, and self-denying tradesman straight into the Bankruptcy Court.
But Oliver was fated to share the lot of most real reformers and
pioneers of the highest civilisation—the only civilisation which is
not merely skin-deep, but which, penetrating to the core, pervades the
whole man, and by the grace of God never leaves him, only departing
when he himself departs, to dwell with him in heavenly habitations—and
of the righteous Gospel which the Lord of Righteousness delivered to be
worked out—not in church or chapel wholly or even principally, but on
such fields as the Rialto of Venice or the London Exchange, the shops
of common tradesmen, the tables where feasts, great and small, are
held, the hearths round which men and women meet to rest from the work
of the day, and cheer their souls.
But Oliver had to discover for himself, in more ways than one, the
pithiness of the proverb that to give a dog an ‘ill name’ is to hang
him, that to run a-muck against popular prejudices is to suffer injury
more or less severe, and wait long for any shadow of a reward.
He had no manner of doubt that the reward of disarming distrust and
establishing a right to success would come in time, if the worker
could but possess his soul in patience, and exercise sufficient faith,
endurance, and bountiful liberality, if he could tarry and lay out,
nothing doubting, fresh materials and pains.
Oliver’s fortitude was not exhausted, but he was sensible he had spent
some of his funds freely, and would soon be living on the verge of his
income, if he did not economise every fraction and dedicate it to its
proper use.
The secession of Jim Hull, with the establishment of his nephew in fine
new baking premises and a fine new business in the town, had diverted
a large slice of the public confidence and custom from what were now
held the _old_ Constable premises and business. The slice was always
increasing in size, and diminishing the original _pièce de résistance_,
from which it had been taken by the shrewdness which proved quite
justified in the anticipation that the public would prefer apparent
purity and actual adulteration, both in the produce of the mill and the
bakehouse, to the uncorrupted but unbleached article.
There was the additional stimulus to the withdrawal of patronage
of a strong spice of malicious satisfaction, not enough to form
a conspiracy, but existing in sufficient abundance for lending
countenance and support, whether sly or bold, to a rival business
conducted on good old-fashioned, rational, give-and-take principles.
Oliver Constable had come among the Friarton shopkeepers uttering
high-flown heresy, witnessing in his conduct against time-honoured
liberties of trade, and stirring up doubts in the bosoms of the very
tradesmen—not to say of their customers. So the Dadd and Polley part
of the community had no objection that Oliver should bear in his own
person the brunt of his Quixotic ideas. Perhaps that would teach him to
pay greater respect to their superior age and experience.
In short, Oliver’s business profits were diminishing so steadily as
to threaten to make his mill and bakehouse eat their own heads, if
he did not diminish in proportion the staffs of millers and bakers—a
step which he objected to take so long as he could afford to hold
out, since it would not only be tantamount to an admission that he was
outmatched, he argued with himself, it would be hard upon the men who
had submitted to his rules and consented to work on his terms—not that
he had altogether overcome the workmen’s opposition. His reputation
had gone abroad as a master full of new-fangled fancies and hobbies,
therefore he had been exposed to the further disadvantage of possessing
a succession of restless, suspicious servants, flighty on their own
account, and inclined to perpetual experiments on, and changes of,
employers.
Then Oliver had been of a mind to show that he would not neglect any
lawful means of improving his flour and bread, so he had set about
introducing expensive new machinery into the mill and bakehouse.
But being, after all, a green hand, without his father’s practical
experience in his double trade, the young man committed several
astounding blunders in the adoption of the machinery, and was much out
of pocket as a punishment for the errors of his ignorance. The result
awoke no small amount of jeering, crowing, and laughter at the leading
tea and supper tables of Friarton.
Oliver’s inner man had not fared better during these three harassing
years. Fan’s house was not a second home to him. The sole effect, so
far as he could see, of his striving to fraternise in the true sense
with the Dadds and the Polleys was that he had succeeded in arousing
in his father’s old allies a hostile and mocking temper, not pleasant
to encounter. Since his quarrel with Jack Dadd, the old Dadds, who
naturally took their son’s part, had fought shy of Oliver Constable;
and he had also, in some manner, he could not for the life of him tell
how, given serious offence to the whole Polley family. He supposed they
were enlisted, with hot, resentful party spirit, or what they mistook
for party spirit, on Jack Dadd’s side. Oliver was half right, half
wrong. For he was incapable of perceiving the other and major ground
of complaint which the Polleys had against him—because, after raising
false expectations, he had stopped short of seeking to keep company
either with ’Liza or one of her sisters, in the prospect of matrimony.
Mrs. Hilliard had never gone so far as to shut her door against Oliver
Constable. Nay, she had been so candid as to admit with pleasure that
her later prognostications with regard to him had been premature, and
in the main erroneous. But Oliver’s chief inducement—as he had come to
acknowledge to himself after there was no further need of crushing it
down—for availing himself of the privilege of visiting at the Meadows,
had vanished from the date of the terrible illness which had seized
on Catherine Hilliard. It was one of the worst of those indefinite,
incalculable, nervous illnesses, bred of the conditions of modern
life, which have no beginning and no end, which baffle by their very
intangibility and paralyse by their unrelaxing clutch, and one of whose
horrors is that in their abnormal character they may develop symptoms
piteously fantastic and grotesque, like the antics of madness. Such
illnesses, dreaded not without cause, are apt, when they spare the
wasted life, to reduce the patient to a state of unrelieved, permanent
prostration and chronic invalidism, which is death in life.
Catherine Hilliard had drifted away from her friends on the misty,
dreary sea of illness which had no shore, till she seemed lost to them
here, till even to Oliver Constable—who now owned to himself, like the
_Bursch_ in the famous _Burschenlied_, that he had loved her always and
would love her throughout eternity—she survived chiefly as the aching,
melancholy thought of the girl who had been capable of dreaming noble
things, but who had not been able to grasp the truth that behind the
commonest, even the most sordid, absolutely repulsive details of human
life, there exist nobler things still than man or woman ever dreamt of
in their highest philosophy.
And the brute creation, which Catherine Hilliard had so loved,
preferring it to the human, drew dumbly and wistfully away from the
decline of her humanity; while the book world in which she had elected
to dwell, crumbled into dust around her. She had left books too behind
her, and the beings that peopled her present existence were more
visionary than the ghosts she had formerly chosen for her company.
Oliver could only look forward to her deliverance from this last
bondage to the unreal, by her entrance on unsealed and everlasting
verities.
Then it was when Oliver was most tempted to regard his enterprise as
a wretched disappointment, he was called on to take up the burden of
another man’s failure.