Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
VOL. I.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
MILLER AND BAKER
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOL. I.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1880
[_All rights reserved_]
_TO MARGARET_
MOTHER AND SISTER IN ONE: LOVING AND FAITHFUL FELLOW-WORKER WHOSE EAGER
INTEREST IN THIS STORY PROVED ITS AUTHOR’S GREATEST ENCOURAGEMENT IN
WRITING IT: WHOSE DEATH BEFORE THE STORY WAS FINISHED DARKENED LIFE AND
WORK TO ONE SOLITARY WORKER
_IN HOPE OF_
_THE TIMES OF RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS_
OXFORD: _17th April 1880_
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FRIARTON MILL 1
II. OLIVER CONSTABLE’S RETURN 23
III. OLIVER’S ANNOUNCEMENT 54
IV. A HOT ARGUMENT 86
V. A LAST APPEAL 112
VI. LOUISA AND CATHERINE HILLIARD 136
VII. HOW MRS. HILLIARD AND CATHERINE
JUDGED THE LAST ST. GEORGE OF
FRIARTON 167
VIII. OLIVER’S PROCLAMATION IN THE MILL AND
THE BAKEHOUSE 193
IX. THE NEW TENANTS OF COPLEY GRANGE
FARM 227
X. OLIVER’S NOTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP 274
OLIVER CONSTABLE,
_MILLER AND BAKER_.
CHAPTER I.
FRIARTON MILL.
OLD mills which were built to be worked by water power are mostly
picturesque objects in the landscape. They command without fail certain
advantages of situation. Certainly they are not likely to possess
extensive views, where they stand in the low lands which claim a fall
of water. But water is their specialty, and where there is water, there
is generally wood. My readers must call up without any difficulty
before their minds’ eyes pleasant pictures of such mills with their
placid dams and flashing weirs, their great mill wheels and their
noisy clappers, their dusty sacks and their equally dusty millers, so
proverbial for their white coats as to have lent a popular name to one
pollen sprinkled auriculus. Mill and water, wheel and man, are all set
in a green leafy nook which forms the broadest possible contrast to the
grey bare downs on which the windmill extends its giant arms and swings
its flapping sails. Picture and song have enshrined the old water mills
from the days when Constable the painter loved to represent on canvas
such a Suffolk mill as that which was familiar to his youth, to the
later days when Tennyson wrote his idyll of the Miller’s Daughter.
Of all mills which had their sites chosen with reference to water,
though the millers—not anticipating Mr. Ruskin’s objections—had long
before the present day, by the help of machinery, set seasons of
drought at defiance, none was more thoroughly picturesque in its own
line of picturesqueness, pleasanter to all the senses, more homelike,
restful and sweet, like a thrush’s nest or a tuft of primroses, than
Friarton Mill in Holmshire. It was so evidently agreeable to the
eye, and had attained to such an amount of fame for this desirable
quality, that it had been suffered to remain where it had been built
in primitive easy-going times, within a stone’s throw of the park of
Copley Grange, and in full view of the manor-house. In fact it had been
found that, after the fashion of those happy accidents which create
leaning towers and whispering galleries, and which can never be copied
with any certainty of success, the indifference to æsthetics which
had made the old squire of Copley Grange permit the miller of his day
to erect his mill at his liege lord’s elbow, had been oddly enough
rewarded by furnishing the Squire’s descendants or successors with
one of the choicest bits of what we may call landscape vertu—a home
lion which, as the modern squires were not needy men, and had further
acquired the modern culture of beauty to their finger tips, they would
not have lacked for a good many broad acres. If the reigning miller and
owner of Friarton Mill had been Vandal enough to propose to demolish
it—which he could have done since his fathers had bought it and certain
pasture fields of the original suzerain—he would have awakened the
liveliest consternation in the breasts of his social superiors.
The loss of Friarton Mill would have gone far to destroy the
picturesque charm of Copley Grange, with all its advantages of
wood and water. For, to the deep regret of its youngest sons and
daughters, their ancestor under the second George had taken it
upon him with no consideration for the tastes and feelings of
his great-great-grandchildren to pull down a gem of a rambling,
inconvenient, half-ruinous Elizabethan manor-house. And he had
replaced it with a distressingly heavy, square pile of masonry, in
which he and the architect had actually thought of little save of
expressing pompously their ideas of space and comfort. The little
which went beyond these prosaic requirements had borne the doubtful
fruit of an Italian portico. It had been voted elegant and classical
by the contemporaries of the unfortunate squire who was thus severely
reflected upon by his heirs. In a few more years it might rise again
into value. It might be prized as a proof of past style, of the
tendency of the day, serving as a key to the prevalence of fiddle brown
in artists’ work, and to the choice of subjects in Richard Wilson’s
paintings, or as an indication of something else equally interesting.
But in the present day, with which after all this generation has most
to do, it was regarded as an incongruous humbug.
The living representative of the family at Copley Grange had done
what he could to remedy the fatal error of his ancestor. He had
succeeded, when he came of age, to the savings of a long minority. He
was also the manager in chief of a large endowment which a pious and
charitable predecessor had bequeathed to support a Copley Grange row
of almshouses. By a most fortuitous circumstance, if not by a clear
interposition of Providence, as the young Squire was disposed to think,
this endowment had been legally disputed, and had remained in abeyance
till the lawyers picked as much flesh as they could off its bones, so
that the rearing of the fabric, which was to be emblematic to all time,
fell to a nineteenth-century man. He improved the circumstance. Instead
of building a set of ordinary red brick cottages with little cottage
kailyards, which might have fitly housed and afforded recreation to
twenty old Copley Grange labourers and their aged partners, he let in a
little light on the crass ignorance of the destroyer of the Elizabethan
manor-house, by building in the immediate vicinity of Copley Grange a
terrace of dainty little structures, all gables and mullioned windows,
and stacks of chimneys—with pleasure-grounds having thickets and lawns
to correspond, which took several experienced gardeners, told off for
the purpose, to keep them in order. Finally he built a tiny alms-house
chapel on the strictest principles of mediæval architecture. The
carving within and without, the painted glass, the frescoes, the Latin
texts which might have been Greek or Hebrew to the daily worshippers,
the peal of bells, supplied a boast to the county guide-book.
It is another question whether the poor old bodies, whose number was
now limited to eight, and whose taste could hardly be supposed to have
reached the stage at which that unlucky forefather of the Squire’s had
committed his solecism, did not feel far from home, aggrieved, and made
mountebanks of in their new quarters. The arrangements, which included
endless draughty corners, and troublesome, perilous steps up and steps
down, were purely perplexing and affronting to the occupants of the
almshouses. These pensioners were taken out of ugly houses on a level
with their capacities, and therefore more to their minds. The old men
and women, too old to learn, were elected according to the reigning
Squire and his wife’s will and pleasure, and somewhat with reference to
the worn out labourers’ venerable beards and their wives’ smooth silver
braids of hair, or to the couples’ reasonable disposition to avail
themselves of blackthorn sticks and silver-rimmed spectacles, as well
as to their general good behaviour, and what might be reckoned upon in
the matter of their punctual and decorous attendance at the chaplain’s
daily services.
Naturally, perhaps, the recipients of the Squire’s bounty were not
particularly grateful for the manner of its bestowal. They were too
practical and hard pressed to refuse a refuge which after all was
far before the poor-house. But old Mrs. Scud expressed boldly the
secret sentiments of six out of the eight women when she declared she
‘wished Squire’s lady would try a day’s washing herself, and see if she
would like it, in a nasty cold common wash-house which anybody might
halve and quarter, and who wanted that imperent, pushing Mrs. Webb,
or sly Anne Sole, to come in and take a invitory of their old men’s
wussen shirts, and their own darnedest stockings, when they had been
accustomed to wash nice and comfortable in private on their own warm
hearth-stone where nobody could come and spy, without the missus of the
house’s leave? Ah! she were missus of her house in them days, and not
bound to say her prayers at the gentlefolks’ pleasure. What good could
that do to her poor old soul, she would like to know? It “might lend a
lift” to her betters’ souls, since they were always in luck, but forced
prayers never did no good to them as said them, that she would take her
Bible oath on.’
And old Mr. Fry (the members of the stranded colony were each strictly
Mr. and Mrs. among themselves, unless in the case of a miserable
spinster who had missed her mark, like Anne Sole) daringly defined the
opinions of his brethren when he protested he would give all ‘them
fandangles of shrubberies and grass that were of no good save to the
screeching birds of the air as he was not allowed to put a finger on,
for his old cabbage bed, where, as everybody knew, he had riz the
whitest-hearted cabbages in the parish, not to say for his pig-stye,
where, when he could do a double day’s work, and was well-to-do—never
thinking what he would come to—as some there could bear him witness, he
had fed prime pigs as were a pleasure to look at.
So it became another question whether the owner of Copley Grange had
altogether fulfilled the intention—always supposing it to have been
kindly and not ostentatious or selfish in disguise—of his forerunner,
as he was fully persuaded he had done, while he fumed over the
thanklessness and discontent of the poor, or whether he had served
himself and ridden his hobby to the death, by way of loving his
neighbour.
When all was done, the Copley Grange Almshouses were only a modern
antique, and the Squire had too much taste not to prefer the real
antique of Friarton Mill, which was not his property, indeed, but was
set down within a stone’s throw of his grounds. As he took care to keep
on the best terms with the miller, the Squire flattered himself, it was
as safe almost, as though it were in his own hands. He was at liberty
to take his guests over it at all hours, in the course of the shortest
of strolls, and he had so managed a vista of old thorn trees that the
mill formed the loveliest vignette from the grand drawing-room windows.
There was no inscription on the building, and there is no existing
architecture which could decide the date when Friarton Mill was built.
Popular tradition, which always tends to the age of good Queen Bess,
as if it had been golden and not iron in English annals, loosely
attributed that date to the mill. Undoubtedly, it was so old that even
its unsophisticated millers had grown proud and careful of its age,
as a man who will ignore and trample upon his years at sixty, nay, at
threescore and ten, will boast of them, and cherish them tenderly from
eighty upwards. Everything about the mill, except the iron machinery
which was kept out of sight, was white powdered or silvery grey, or
rich brown, or toned in sage or olive green, dull crimson, and dusky
orange by stonecrops and lichens, as no art-school design could tone
colours. The building stood as near the water as an old Venetian palace
is to its canal. The site must have been untenable in an English
climate to any miller who was not proof against the chest complaints
and rheumatisms that English flesh is heir to, had not the water which
in floods lapped the mill walls been the flow just below the weir. It
was always rapid in its current, thus carrying off a large proportion
of its own vapour, never stagnated in pools, nor, even when there
was least water, dried up in portions of its channel, throwing off
unwholesome miasma in the process. Another protection to the miller
and his family was, that his two-storied, stone-roofed, dwelling
house, built at right angles to the mill, stood by the whole breadth
of its court back from the water where the ground rose, and a natural
drainage filtered away the damp in the soil. Actual evidence removed
all reproach of slimy or mildewed unwholesomeness from Friarton Mill,
or, for that matter, from the mansion-house of Copley Grange, which
stood only a little farther from what was still called ‘the Brook,’ or
‘Buller’s Brook.’ No races of men or women in the parish had been, in
the memory of the oldest Friarton man (and he was to be found in the
Copley Grange Almshouses), stronger and longer-lived, in the main, than
the two families which had for generations dwelt in the mill and the
manor-house.
On the face of the mill, as it fronted the water, opening from the
second story, was a curiously carved wooden gallery, such as one meets
with in Nüremberg and some of the older German towns. It had been
intended originally to hold sacks of corn or flour, which were hoisted
up or lowered down by a crane from, or to, the narrow road-way—only
broad enough at the widest to hold a single farm cart with its
horses—that interposed between the mill and the water. The gallery had
become obsolete for this purpose, having been superseded by other and
ampler contrivances on the other side of the mill; and a great willow
tree had been allowed to grow up and still farther impede the road-way,
which it narrowed to a footpath, as it spread out its roots, and flung
across its higher branches until they drooped over the water. But the
respect which had been developed for every sign of the mill’s antiquity
not only saved the gallery from destruction, but, in order to keep up
its character, caused it to be occasionally used still, as a place of
deposit for floury sacks. It was more frequently employed as a point
of vantage which the miller could appropriate—a place for smoking his
pipe and staring at the water beneath his feet; where the gentle folks
from Copley could come and loiter and gaze abroad into the recesses of
Copley Grange Park, which was only divided from the mill by the Brook
and a sunk fence.
The park was by no means large, but the ground was undulating, and,
furnished with patches of bracken, old thorns, brakes of hazel and
blackberry, and some magnificent oaks and beeches, it formed of itself
dells and dingles, which had the appearance of stretching far and wide.
At two seasons of the year the view from the gallery of Friarton
Mill which did not extend beyond the park, and had the objection, if
you will, of being shut in, ‘tame and domestic,’ formed at the same
time a nearly perfect bit of woodland, while the well ‘seasoned’
Georgian house, with the Italian façade in the foreground, stopped
short of being an eyesore. In late spring, when the tender green of
the beech and oak contrasted with the sombre green of the fir, and
was relieved by the white blossoms of the wild crab and pear trees;
when the gnarled hawthorn bushes, in the dim light of early morning
or late twilight, stood crowned like ‘aged men,’ or in the glory of
noon bent like veiled brides; when clusters of red May and the spikes
of the red-flowered chestnut—introduced to compete with the native
trees—lent a half tropical brilliance to the sweet English purity of
the colouring; when the turf below was here and there pale gold with
primroses or misty blue with hyacinths; when blackbirds and thrushes
sang openly and unblushingly to their mates on every spray, and the
cuckoo’s note and the ringdove’s call sounded from hidden hollows; when
the first nightingale made night tuneful and poured out his passion
till it rose in liquid clearness above the monotonous rush and tinkle
of the waters, then Copley Grange Park, and Friarton Mill were at
their second best. For the autumn suited them even better than the
spring, nothing could surpass the exquisite rich mellowness and tender
delicacy when the ripe brown chestnut was dropping from its husk on
the water-of-Nile coloured grass, in the chillness of October; when
the five fingers of the chestnut leaves and the vine leaf of the maple
were burning in maize colour; when the oak was russet, the beech and
wild cherry crimson darkening into purple or streaked with scarlet;
the birch and the elm straw and daffodil colour; when the bracken was
rusty; when only the trill of the robin and the distant bark of a
dog broke the stillness of the earth resting from its labours with a
curtain of haze falling between it and the dappled sky.
But in winter also, when Buller’s Brook was hanging with icicles, and
‘roaring and reaming’ after it had broken its frozen bounds, and the
grass was sere, and the boughs of the trees stood out bare and black,
unless where the sunlight caught those near at hand, and brought out
their furry greys, and the blue bloom of a plum, hovering about the
twigs and bourgeons; or when they were feathered with hoar frost or
panoplied with snow, standing out in dead cold masses against the
leaden grey of the clouds—the park, as seen from the mill gallery,
was not to be despised by any hardy sight-seer who could face with
fortitude benumbed toes and tingling fingers.
The court before the mill-house had its own tree, a round-headed
bushy mulberry tree, while the house itself was covered with several
old-fashioned rose bushes, including a monthly rose which did not
wait for June, but sent out its china pink buds early in May, and
went on obligingly, supplying large instalments of various shades of
magenta-coloured, faintly smelling roses, from month to month, till
November, if the winter were not a hard one. The other roses, noisette
and a crimson—acquiring a duller purple tinge, perhaps the nearest
approach to ‘blue roses’ in fading—adhered strictly to June and
July for flowering in one blow, but they made up as much as possible
for their unbending character in this respect by pouring forth, when
they did blossom, a prodigal wealth of roses, which in their turn
discharged a perfect avalanche of crumbled petals into the court and
on the breast of the brook, that ran, for days at a time, pied like
a daisy, impartially divided into the colours of York and Lancaster,
as other rivers have run yellow with gold or red with blood. One side
of the house would show sumptuous crimson without a green leaf for a
whole fortnight, when it was not a rainy summer; and as for the ivory
white noisette roses, the half-blown buds and flowers on a branch could
be counted by the fifty, and a single cluster would fill one of Fan
Constable’s crazy, tottering flower-glasses.
At one time the older of these rose trees, with the ‘mulberry-bush,’
as it was called, had served for a flower-garden to the mill-house, as
the bough of a tree or a few stones on the stage used to stand for a
forest or a rocky pass. Then the dwellers in the mill-house became less
primitive in their notions, and not so easily satisfied. The miller’s
wife had her border round her court with daffodils and carnations,
sweet-williams and sunflowers in their order, until at last the border
merged into a walled garden, which, in addition to its apricot-trees
and its early peas and potatoes, had its dahlia and salvia beds, and
its frames for raising geraniums and verbenas, all of them not so far
behind the terraces and green-houses at Copley Grange.
But full of living beauty as Friarton Mill and Copley Grange were,
their owners did not escape the curse of humanity, and the dead were
lying at the same time both in the mill-house and the grange. Old Peter
Constable had paid his last debt, and been gathered to his fathers—full
of days and of such honours as an honest, active useful life cannot
fail to gather; and the Squire’s wife had inherited so little strength
that she had died, worn out with sustaining the dignity and refinement
of her station and with bearing three children, before she had attained
her twenty-fifth year.