OLIVER CONSTABLE’S RETURN.
FAN CONSTABLE was in the drawing-room of the mill-house, awaiting the
return of her brother from his last term at Oxford. A mill-house may
have its drawing-room, and its son may have been at Oxford, and that
not in the old capacity of a servitor, in the experience of modern
England.
Old Peter Constable, who had inherited from his father not only
Friarton Mill and its meadows, but the chief baking business in the
town of Friarton, had possessed other flour mills also, and had died a
well-to-do man. He might have gone a little way off and kept a much
more pretentious establishment than that of Friarton Mill, without
being guilty of extravagant housekeeping for his means. But he was
neither ashamed of his origin nor of his business; he was unassuming
in his nature, and he was almost as proud of the old place with an
instinctive unquestioning fondness, as his neighbour the Squire adored
it on the last principles of taste.
The miller and baker’s only son had distinguished himself as a boy in
his classes at Friarton Grammar School—which was rather famous among
grammar schools, and, having acquired a good name for sending up lads
who took scholarships, and became in due time fellows and tutors of
Oxford colleges, was eager to keep up its reputation, and, by the
mouths of its masters, egged on promising pupils to go in for the
prizes of learning. The case of Oliver Constable formed no exception.
It seemed as if he were only fulfilling his part of the obligation,
when, after having been head boy at Friarton, he went up to Oxford
and immediately vindicated the propriety of the step by gaining a
scholarship—though indeed his father was sufficiently well off to make
no objection to paying his son’s college terms in full.
Old Peter Constable continued to have no scruple on the point of
maintaining his son at Oxford, because at the end of Oliver’s first
term there occurred a passage between the father and son which may
sound incredible, but which actually had a precedent, that appeared
in print in the life of a Scotch earl and his heir. The miller, like
the old Earl of Elgin, feeling highly gratified by his boy’s success,
thought to reward it by sending him as big a cheque as the elder man
felt justified in giving over and above the younger man’s income,
bidding him spend that in any manner which might please him best.
And the young miller, like the young earl, returned the cheque with
a grateful acknowledgment of the kindness of the intention, and an
announcement that he had no use for the money; he was amply provided
with the sinews of war already; he would rather the sum were spent in
procuring some special pleasure for the father, who was frugal and
self-denying in his personal habits, or for the sister Fan, who, being
a girl—and an only and motherless girl—needed particular indulgence.
It remained to be proved whether the young miller would follow up his
extraordinary moderation by a career in any respect parallel to that of
the patriotic statesman.
But in spite of Peter Constable’s pride and confidence in his son
from the beginning, it had not been without a certain ruefulness that
the man had consented to the single lad of the Constables’ household
forsaking the old path, which in Peter’s eyes was the safest and
pleasantest in the world, and which had been trodden smooth—as it
were, sprinkled white—for young Oliver by his father, grandfather,
and great-grandfather. The Constables were not of a rank to go beyond
a great-grandfather, but there had been at least three generations of
them in Friarton Mill and Friarton bakehouse, and mill and bakehouse
had flourished under the Constables’ rule, and had been known far
and wide for as unadulterated, well-ground flour, and as honestly
kneaded bread as could be expected from fallible men. The staff of
life, preserved as nearly as possible intact, had proved a boon to the
community, while the community in its turn had rewarded its faithful
servants by becoming their steady patrons.
Of course the mill and the bakehouse must pass away from the family if
Oliver developed into a scholar and gentleman, unless, to be sure, Fan
married a miller and baker, which did not seem likely. On the whole,
fully sensible as Peter felt that Oliver was a credit and even an
honour to his people, the miller would a good deal rather that his son
had remained in his own rank of life, and taken over from his failing
hands the old mill, which was the next thing to ‘parent, child and
wife’ in its owner’s estimation.
Events had not so shaped themselves, while Peter Constable was modest,
just, even generous. He would not set up his judgment against the
combined opinions of those who ought to know better—the learned masters
and parsons of Friarton Grammar School. Old Peter would not let his
prepossessions and prejudices stand in the way of Oliver’s rise in
life, if Oliver chose to rise; though to Peter’s mind such an ascent
was very often neither a comfortable nor a creditable process. He would
not constrain the lad to sacrifice an ambition which, with his gifts,
might be natural and proper in him, in order to maintain old landmarks.
As for Oliver, he responded plastically to the promptings of his
early teachers. He was keen on colleges and college-learning with
all the power and delight which those ideas then involved for him.
And the child Fan was even more enthusiastic than her brother on the
associations and attainments he was entering upon. She set herself
with the pertinacity and absence of reasonable calculation of a woman,
from the day Oliver left for college, to qualify herself for being, at
no distant day, the worthy sister and fit companion of a great don—a
dignitary high up in the Church, or an honoured judge.
So Peter tried also to accommodate himself to the will of Providence
and the force of circumstances. He was too old, indeed, to begin a
course of training in order to figure suitably as the father of one
of the magnates whose laurels were so quickly and easily won—in Fan’s
imagination. He knew full well, that though his boy as yet was the same
to him, and came home in the long vacation, rather to Fan’s disgust,
unforgetful of and undisgusted with a single homely detail of the old
life, though Oliver was, as he had ever been, perfectly natural and
unaffected, and would lend a hand to make up accounts and to help his
father with the management of the large business and many servants
in every way in the young man’s power, still in the course of time
Oliver’s widely different occupations must separate father and son.
Even already, in the midst of the son’s staunchness to first ties,
the father recognised with a curious mixture of fatherly pride and
sharp twinges of pain, in spite of his fatherly unselfishness, the
certain consequences of Oliver’s withdrawal from handicraft or trade
and absorption in the pursuit of learning, and in the companionship of
the class with regard to which Peter, in spite of his sagacity, fully
believed the pursuit of learning was the regular business of the
members’ lives, unless when they took a little bodily recreation in
the form of cricket, or boating, or sport. Oliver might be as humble
and hearty as he liked, but he was growing in the very tone of his
voice, and carriage of his head, and movement of his hand, more and
more of a gentleman, like the Squire and his friends. The boy could
not help himself; it was to his credit that he should, like good wood,
take on polish so rapidly. But though he would never turn his back on
his father, the men would gradually grow strange and shy as companions
to each other. All the more reason, Peter thought bravely and
disinterestedly, for him to make matters as smooth and easy to Oliver
when he should come after him, his father, as the old miller could
contrive. There were certain things which he, Peter, could still do
better than his clever, cultivated son, and it was some indemnification
to Peter for his own loss to do them for Oliver.
Peter sold advantageously the leases of the mills he had taken on in
addition to Friarton, and laid up the purchase-money in the funds,
where it would be no trouble, but a decided boon, to a gentleman and
scholar, as well as to Fan. Peter was on terms for the sale of the
baking business, but he could not find it in his heart to dispose of
Friarton Mill, though he knew he should always find a ready buyer in
the squire of Copley Grange, who would willingly suffer Peter to stay
on as tenant in the place for the rest of his life. But the miller
fancied Oliver might care to retain the mill, letting it to a tenant
who should reserve quarters for the landlord if ever he liked to
revisit the mill-house.
Death stepped in and settled all the arrangements before Peter had
come to an end of his plans for his son’s greater ease and well-being.
The miller died peacefully with Oliver sharing Fan’s watch by their
father’s pillow, raising, for an interval of relief on the broad young
breast, the bowed shoulders on which the young man, as a child, had so
often ridden triumphantly, and receiving reverently and tenderly the
last fluttering sigh.
In those first days of mourning little had been said of Oliver’s future
line of life, which had still remained so far undecided at the time
of his father’s death. As a matter of course, Oliver had returned to
Oxford to finish his term and take his degree, which he did with all
the _éclat_ that had been expected from him, winning a first class,
and immediately afterwards returning to Friarton Mill—his first return
since his father’s death—with Fan awaiting him to do what she could to
make up for the absence of another face and voice by lavishing upon her
brother her unbounded congratulations.
It was the month of June, one of the two seasons when Friarton Mill was
the nearest to an Arcadia. Enough of time had passed for Fan Constable
to be comforted for her old father’s death. She was able to hail her
brother’s arrival on the heels of his achievement, with all it implied
to her, in a spirit of exalted approbation. She was anxious to do him
all the honour in her power, and she displayed her anxiety according to
her instincts and training.
It was the fashion in Friarton to say that Fan Constable was a
worldly-minded as well as an unjustifiably proud and assuming young
woman. But Fan expressed herself on this occasion in a sufficiently
simple manner. She conned a cookery book, and tormented the miller’s
old housekeeper to cook a dinner, which Sally Pope said might have
been another funeral or wedding feast; and farther exasperated Sally
by bidding her serve it at a late hour. In the meantime Fan repaired
with all her belongings to the drawing-room, which had not been her
ordinary sitting-room. She had previously dressed herself in her best
gown of dim black silk and crape, with its sweeping train, and she now
sat down to look out for Oliver with an impatiently throbbing heart.
That drawing-room had been inaugurated by Fan, and yet it did not
reflect her character in the slightest degree. It was a singularly
colourless, pointless room, and Fan’s was not a colourless or pointless
nature. Fan’s taste had been just so far educated as to have reached
the chill circle of negation. She was able to reject with aversion
the stuffy crowd of incongruous, inconsequent tables and chairs, the
tawdry or glaring vulgarity of ornament in the houses of the wealthier
tradespeople, and even of the condescending professional people of
Friarton, with whom her visiting-list began and ended. Therefore
there was none of the embarrassment of more than doubtful riches apt
to distinguish third- or fourth-rate drawing-rooms in the room at
Friarton Mill. There were no Berlin wool or bead monstrosities, no
‘table books’ overpoweringly gorgeous, like the Queen’s Lifeguards,
in scarlet and gold bindings; no terrible specimens of art in
water-colours or chalks, no china chimney vases painted coarsely in
all the colours of the rainbow, and reckoned very handsome jars by
their complacent possessors; no starched tangles of white cotton,
crackling at every touch, on the backs of chairs and sofas, or on the
faces of little tables, attaching themselves without permission to the
collars of coats and the sleeves of gowns. Fan knew better than these
attributes of half civilisation went, but her knowledge stopped short
there, and only served to reveal her remaining amount of ignorance.
And she was so afraid of compromising herself in her ignorance that
she restricted herself as severely in her drawing-room as though
she had been a social Puritan: she ventured on little or nothing
beyond the absolutely necessary rosewood tables and cane seats of the
simplest form, the carpet and hangings of the most subdued tint and
pattern, the plain cottage piano with its heap of music, not in admired
disorder, but in deliberate tidiness in the background,—the attenuated
flower-glasses which would only hold the most attenuated bouquets. The
one error which Fan had allowed herself to fall into, was still on the
side of colourlessness and coldness. There was a large mirror over the
plain white marble chimney-piece which reflected and intensified with a
stony, topographical correctness the dim, meagre effect of the room.
There could not have been a wider contrast between the interior and
the world without, to which the room ought to have had an affinity,
between the natural homeliness and affluence of sweet beauty and gaiety
in the Friarton Mill surroundings, and the artificial vow of perpetual
frigidity and austerity—according to which Fan’s drawing-room was
arranged.
‘That drawing-room of Fan Constable’s is another version of the glacial
theory,’ Mrs. Hilliard, the most privileged and liveliest woman in
Friarton, used to declare, with a shrug of her shoulders and a real
shiver. ‘It is the bondage to starvation of rising gentility.’
Fan was perfectly conscious of a deficiency, while she would rather lay
herself open to a charge of something lacking in her room, than to the
countercharge of false adornment. But she was not sensible that the
chief and unpardonable defect was the absence of all trace of human joy
or sorrow, all touch of human character and token of individual bent,
which might have redeemed the barest room; and that it was the sense of
uneasiness and uncertainty, of doubting and halting on the threshold
of a new order of existence which rendered the atmosphere of this
room repellant as well as cold. Mrs. Hilliard was speaking a certain
amount of nonsense when she added that Fan’s room contained the last
drawing-room suite advertised by Maple or Shoolbred, weeded to death,
since neither Maple—nor Morris himself—could have adequately supplied
the fatal weakness of that room.
But Fan’s own presence did something to enrich it. Fan in her sweeping
mourning was a small, fine-featured, keen-eyed, dark-haired, restless
little woman, whose temperament was the reverse of lymphatic, who had
none of the facile, mindless, heartless sweetness that would have added
the last mawkish offence to the other offences. How a creature like Fan
could exist even for an hour at a time in such a domestic desert, how
she could fail to impress on it some token of her ardent identity, only
proved the strong self-restraint, the determination of purpose of which
the girl was capable.
Fan was idle this afternoon as she was rarely idle, since her
energy, like that of Michael the Wizard’s little fiends, demanded a
constant field for its operation; and as she was inclined to treat
with withering contempt all the poor little girlish fancy-work which
had ever come under her notice, she was notable, for her years, in
household management, and practical in feminine wisdom. Fan could have
kept the house, and regulated and overlooked the _ménage_ very nearly
as well as Sally Pope—in fact she did so when Sally would let her—and
this is no small testimony to Fan’s talents, for old Sally Pope was
an experienced and efficient, if conceited, housekeeper and cook. Not
a girl in Friarton, not one of the well-born vicar’s daughters, who
had each received an excellent education, seen something of the great
world, was clever in her own way, and knew herself compelled to make
the most of her allowance for dress and minor expenses, could spend
that allowance more judiciously in every respect than Fan Constable—who
might have been supposed to revel in rude abundance—could dispose of
her private income. Not a girl, hardly a matron in the parish, was so
available for choir-practising, school teaching, managing the details
of charitable clubs as Fan Constable had already proved herself,—facts
which the vicar’s wife, and the mistress of Copley Grange, when she was
alive, knew right well.
Fan acted more from general good principles, and, perhaps, in some
measure, unconsciously from policy, than from a purely benevolent
temper. Yet at the most unexpected seasons, and in circumstances which
were not so much out of the common as to warrant an exception to the
rule, Fan Constable would suddenly amaze and overcome her coadjutors
by a burst of womanly tenderness, deep, wistful and self-accusing,
perfectly irresistible in such a woman.
It was by dint of her early strength of will, and of something sterling
in her earnestness even when the game did not seem worth the candle,
quite as much as on account of her father’s purse and a credulous
faith in her brother’s genius—with the future honour which it might
reflect on Friarton, that Fan had been lifted over the heads of her
compeers and promoted to a somewhat difficult footing, for which it
is needless to say that she had to bear much obloquy, in a rank of
society considerably above what was the original sphere of the owners
of Friarton Mill.
Fan could not work on the eve of what she was firmly persuaded must be
one of the great crises of her life. Oliver was coming home crowned
with the only laurels he could have gathered; and Fan had the entire
sympathy with the gathering which belonged to the consciousness that
she too was capable of enterprise and application, though not in
securing such triumphs as Oliver had won. Fan knew perfectly that she
was not clever in one sense; she was even slow where book-learning was
concerned. Of course, she had by perseverance mastered the obstacles
which had lain in the way of her becoming a fairly well-educated girl,
after her father had been induced to send her to good schools both
at home and abroad; and she had striven hard to cultivate her mind
and taste still farther, so as to become a tolerable companion for
Oliver—one of whom he need not be ashamed when educated men and refined
women were his daily associates.
Still the truth remained that Fan was not intellectual—like Catherine
Hilliard at the Meadows, or Lucy Houghton, the vicar’s eldest daughter,
who might have made some pretence to enact ‘sweet girl-graduates.’
None could be better aware of what she lacked in this respect than
Fan, who had even an inordinate value for the attainments in which
she failed—who felt only the more called upon, with a half-pathetic
meekness and humility in the middle of her pride and high spirit, to
support Oliver’s dignity by the sedulous exercise of the faculties
Providence had given her. She believed she was ladylike, she knew she
was sensible, she felt none could be more deeply attached to Oliver
and his interests. She was prepared to prove an excellent mistress of
his establishment and manager of his household expenses, so long as he
needed her. What was still stronger evidence of her devotion, she was
prepared to vacate the post she craved, for the consummation of her
wishes, on a suitable marriage on Oliver’s part. Of course Oliver ought
to marry and marry well, which would be a help to his social position.
Then her services would no longer be required, and—well, she might
possibly marry in her turn.
Oliver was coming home to Friarton Mill, but there was little
likelihood that he would stay there. He might already have formed his
plans—whatever they were Fan was ready to give in her adherence to
them. She had no desire to remain at Friarton Mill; she had, on the
contrary, a great inclination to get away from all that hampered her
and would hamper her brother. She was a woman of strong and faithful
family affections, but she was as nearly as possible without local
attachments. She had a feeling for beauty—rather in form than in
colour, but she was not possessed with the admiration which Friarton
Mill frequently called forth. She rather resented its ardent expression
to her, as some Scotchmen resent the enthusiasm many foreigners
entertain for them in the light of the countrymen of Robert Burns and
Sir Walter Scott.
She did not at all approve of the shape the furor took; and she kept
herself out of the way of those visitors from Copley Grange, who, in
spite of the hints of the Squire, were too stolid in their superior
rank to understand that Fan was not the typical miller’s daughter and
were fain to patronise her under an altogether erroneous impression.
Such gratuitous patronage would fill Fan with an intensity of
indignation and affront so far beyond what the offence deserved, that
the wrath became ludicrous in its anti-climax. It was the new order of
things, it was the coming dignity, it was Oliver the chief bestower of
the dignity, that were all affably patronised in the person of Fan, and
Fan had to be angry for the whole.
At last Oliver turned into the court, walking and carrying his bag from
the station as usual—‘as if nothing had happened,’ Fan exclaimed to
herself, with a quick shade of vexation, while she ran downstairs to
welcome him on the threshold.
There was little family likeness between the brother and sister, as
there were few points in unison in their characters, beyond what
existed in their uprightness and the depth of regard between the
two—who, so far as near kindred was concerned, stood alone in the world
and were all in all to each other. Certainly Oliver was spare as Fan
was slight, and there was a little of a worn look about the young man’s
thin face, which testified to the work of nervous energy there also.
But he was big and Fan was little. His hair was brown, straight, and
already thin. Hers was black, wavy and luxuriant. He had a ruddy tinge
in the brown of his complexion which no burning of the midnight oil—and
he had burned it in his time with a young man’s superb recklessness—had
served to rout. Fan’s complexion was the clear paleness often found in
a brunette.
But the greatest contrast in Oliver and Fan Constable’s features was
found in the eyes, though in both brother and sister these were brown.
Fan’s had the hazel tint and the keen observation combined with the
shyness of a pheasant or a partridge’s eye. Oliver’s eyes were darker
in hue, and though they were not without repressed fire, had much of
the brooding reflectiveness—verging on doggedness—of the ox’s eye.
Oliver Constable was firmly knit, and ought to have carried himself as
easily, and with as natural a grace, in his broad-shouldered height, as
Fan did in her low stature. But the peculiar neatness and daintiness of
personal belongings which constituted not only a crowning distinction
but a ruling passion in Fan, so that slovenliness and disorder caused
her absolute pain, were wholly absent in her brother’s case. There
could not have been the remotest chance, even supposing he had been
a short instead of a tall man, of his worst enemies calling Oliver
‘dapper’ or ‘smug,’ as some of Fan’s ‘dear friends’ chose to term her
‘natty’ or ‘trim.’
But although Oliver wore the grey morning suit which has replaced the
‘purple’ in connection with the ‘fine linen’ in the dress of a Dives
or a duke, which is at once perfectly unassuming and perfectly good of
its kind, the miller’s son and heir suffered from an innate, incurable
personal negligence, such as besets some men in all ranks and in all
nations—only the defect in an Englishman belonging to one of the upper
classes is free from the repulsive element of uncleanliness which is
apt to attend on the Bohemian negligence of a foreigner.
Fan was chronically distressed by this flaw of negligence in Oliver’s
idiosyncrasy. She had made a searching analysis to discover its origin,
in the course of vigorous attempts to overcome the weakness, but she
had been no more able to reach its root than she had succeeded in
shaking its influence for a day. It was not that Oliver was so ill-made
that his coats and trousers would not sit properly on his figure, for
he was really a handsome man if he could have done himself justice. It
was not that the habits of a gentleman did not come naturally to him,
and had not been long practised by him. For that matter their father,
who had never aspired to be more than his father had been before him,
had shown himself a tidy old martinet in his ways—just as she, Fan,
could not bear a pin out of its place, long before she was subjected to
school training. Yet here was Oliver, who had enjoyed every advantage
since he was a mere lad, who was, as Fan owned willingly, more
fastidious than herself in all essentials of manly and womanly good
breeding, in non-essentials a picture of helpless, hopeless disorder
from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; with the shifting
hat or cap on the drifting clouds of brown hair which no close clipping
of barber could keep a week in its place; with his crumpled collar,
his loosened, twisted necktie, his eccentric cuffs—one of which would
disappear up his coat-sleeve, while the other would out-herod fashion
by hanging not merely over his knuckles, but nearly to the tips of his
fingers. The last offence was in his boots, which, let Oliver buy them
from the prince of honest and accomplished boot-makers, in the course
of a week or two, took to disreputable curling up at the toes and going
down at the heels, with an air of being hard upon the parting of upper
leather and sole, and of affording an irresistible attraction to mud
and dust, like the sorriest hob-nailed shoes of any day labourer.
All this in a young, handsome, college-bred man would have been
unpardonable if there had been any cure for it; but Fan in her despair
was profoundly conscious there was none. She might call Oliver to
account every hour of the day, as a mother who is a disciplinarian may
lecture a careless hoyden among her daughters. Oliver would take her
remonstrance in perfect good humour, but he would not be a bit the
better for it. She might quote for his benefit with cutting sarcasm
the old tripping compliment to the very wildness of _abandon_ in
woman’s dress——
‘Hair loosely flowing, dress as free;
Simplicity more taketh me,—’
and ask him if he thought that applied as well to a man’s toilet?
Oliver would laugh and put up his hand, with a sense of guilt, to his
dishevelled moustache, then let it travel further to the Ricquet-like
tufts of his hair. He would look down with too tranquil deprecation at
the handkerchief dangling by one end from his pocket. But though hair
and handkerchief were remedied for the moment, they would be in a worse
condition twenty times before the day was done.
Oliver was also spasmodically awkward in his gestures, a peculiarity
sufficiently noticeable in a well-made man who had taken his share of
muscular exercise and learnt the noble art of self-defence.
Fan’s consolation was that Oliver, though the reverse of a puppy or
even alas! of an Adonis, was still unmistakably a gentleman in his most
extraordinary _gaucheries_; and when he was roused and in earnest, his
passion and determination mastered his mixture of indifference and
nervousness, until the bodily movements responded to the spirit within,
and acquired a certain untrammelled dignity and power.