A LAST APPEAL.
‘THINK twice over what you are going to do,’ urged Fan, for the last
time. ‘I tell you that you look back on the past softened by distance,
and I suppose surrounded by a sort of halo of youthful associations and
kindly recollections. I have never been removed from Friarton Mill for
such a length of time as to forget all its ills and only remember its
advantages. How will you like to hang on in the mill and, worse, in
the bakehouse and shop—to be bearded by your own men, who will be the
first to recognise that you have not been bred to their trade and to
make good use of your ignorance—to be worsted by trades’ unions—for
I conclude bakers will go out “on strike,” if they have not yet done
so—like other work people? How will you stand being patronised by
the farmers and corn-dealers, and having to submit to the whims and
insolence of your customers?’
‘Upon my word, I do not see why I should stand either, if I do my
duty. And I would rather hang on in a mill or a bake-shop than in city
chambers draped round with cobwebs and filled with empty tin boxes
bearing lying titles, or in a vestry hall where I had no business to
be, or in a barrack yard where I should never learn the goose step, or
in stables or kennels.’
‘It is my duty to speak,’ said Fan, solemnly, developing a fine talent
for lecturing; ‘since you have been so long away, you have forgotten
or you do not rightly understand a great deal that will happen if you
persist in your folly. All the better class of people in Friarton—the
Fremantles and Wrights and that set, who took us up because they
expected you to become one of themselves and to do them credit—will
drop us again; and who can blame them? when they discover that you have
no ambition—that you have a taste for low company—so it will seem to
them. We shall of course fall back among the Polleys and the Dadds and
the rest of the tradespeople like ourselves,’ said Fan, bitterly. ‘We
choose their ranks deliberately as ours, and how can we expect that
the members of another rank will continue to stoop to us, or consent,
for our sake, to anything so disagreeable as being habitually mixed up
with people far beneath them in birth and breeding? Are you not able
to recall how dreadful a tea at the Dadds, or a supper at the Polleys,
used to be? How, when you were a boy and knew little else, you hated it
and shirked it, when father would let you?’
Oliver winced a little, but recovered himself gallantly. ‘I was an
intolerable young fool—giving myself airs, as old Dadd once told me
to my face. He is a shrewd intelligent old fellow in his linendrapery
line. One may easily listen to the experience of a far inferior man.’
‘Have you grown fonder of his coarse familiar jokes and the
all-pervading smell of his gin-and-water?’ asked Fan, with scornful
incredulity. ‘If so, perhaps you can also better appreciate young
Dadd’s jewellery and Mrs. Dadd’s mock “umbleness,” like Uriah Heep’s,
to hide her slyness and spitefulness. And you may have come to value,
at their proper worth, the Polley girls’ giggles and shams, and their
mother’s loud self-assertion and sheer impertinence. No doubt you
admire their combined illiterateness and absorption in the pettiest
gossip, their poor aping of the faults, or else their rude defiance of
the merits, of their social superiors. Don’t you know that the Dadd
and Polley idea of a life worth leading, is to make money in order to
eat, drink, and lie in bed, to keep sporting dogs, attend low races
and offer and accept bets, to have parties, “beaux,” and flirtations
to the girls’ hearts’ content? Are greediness, laziness, bumptiousness
and folly—gaudy, tawdry pretence, and coarse gorgeousness, such
admirable qualities in men and women and their surroundings? I declare
the Dadds and Polleys are the most irreverent undutiful people I know.
Oh! Oliver, it is too horrible that the end of your cleverness and
college training should be to condemn yourself, and me with you, to
close contact and hopeless association with such people—when we have no
relief to expect save from our own deterioration. We shall deteriorate
and grow like our neighbours speedily, I daresay, and then we may not
feel that we were ever fit for something better. But how we—one of
us, at least—must suffer in the process of deterioration before it is
complete!’
Fan was perfectly sincere, however absurd, in her horror and distress.
She had a natural abhorrence of the vulgar, gross self-indulgence
which she had described, and an intense yearning for its opposite,
the true refinement of simplicity, self-restraint, and self-devotion,
with its outward expression in the subtle charm of pure and graceful
harmony. There was this to be said for Fan’s ambition, that it was
not composed of coarse materials. It was neither sensual nor sordid.
Fan would have been very tolerably content to be a poor lady among
ladies and gentlemen. She would have made the very best of her gentle
poverty, because she fully comprehended the self-respect involved in
self-denial, the essential honour included in showing regard for the
rights and claims of her neighbours, and in energy, diligence, and
usefulness fitly exercised. Fan had the making of a real lady—rich or
poor—in her. And if she were not speaking under a delusion, it was a
pity that her vocation should be spoilt.
But Oliver dealt her a stern rebuke.
‘This is too bad,’ he said, indignantly, taking the pipe from his
mouth. ‘There is only one grain of truth in your tirade against the
class in which you were born—its members are guilty of aping the
faults of a higher class. As you have yourself said so, you cannot be
ignorant that greed, and its opposite—senseless extravagance, laziness,
levity, and worse, are safe to be found—just masked by a thin veneer
of polish—in still greater abundance among dukes and duchesses—or say
at once kings and queens, than among tradespeople. And you have said
nothing of the peculiar virtues of tradespeople. You spoke of Mrs.
Polley’s self-assertion. I grant it is offensive—but surely you have
been told what that woman has done for her family. When her husband
proved an incapable ne’er-do-well, who if left to himself would have
gone straight to the dogs, and reduced his children to the workhouse,
did not his “missus” come to the front and stand by her master like
a brick and a Trojan? She kept him from both his and her undoing. She
maintained Polley’s grocery business by her industry, and made it
flourish by her mother-wit, till now her husband is no worse than a
tolerably respectable nonentity, and her children have been reared in
independence and comfort. No blame will rest on her if they are not
able to hold their own in the world. I have often heard, and so have
you, my father and old Floyd praise that woman for her works. As for
Mrs. Dadd, I don’t say that her meekness is the real thing, but she is
not without true motherliness and kindness of heart. Have you forgotten
how she left her own child and came out and stayed here to nurse you
through scarlatina because she doubted Sally Pope’s experience and
ability to cope with the disease? For shame! Fan, a short memory is
unpardonable here.’
‘I have not forgotten,’ said Fan, pettishly; ‘if I had, I should not
have kept up the amount of intercourse with the Dadds I have consented
to keep.’
‘No doubt it is a great reward for her trouble and risk that you should
call for her—behaving civilly in the performance of your duty, I take
it for granted—once in three months,’ said Oliver, still in a fume. ‘I
am not of your opinion. But though I have not the same faith in the
light of my countenance, and the edification implied in the bestowal
of my company for a spare half-hour, still I have my own views on the
subject. But upon my honour, Fan, I hesitate at this moment under
a sense of my unworthiness, and a conception of these respectable
people’s positive virtues, to presume to weigh their comparative
defects and measure them against any supposed superiority of intellect
and training on my part. Are brains and culture—of which one hears
so much from pedants and puppies—to be named in the same breath with
honest men and women’s fidelity to their sense of right? But if the
questionable superiority has an existence, am I not called upon by
every dictate of true public spirit and good feeling to show that
superiority by striving to do what I have already spoken of—raise the
tone of my class, and lead it to higher aims and purer pleasures? Is
not that a nobler ambition than to content myself with rising above
my class—abandoning it to grovel in materialism, if not to wallow in
the mire? Do you know that Kingsley said teachers and preachers to the
rich and the poor were not wanting, but where was he who would go on a
mission to the lower middle and small trading classes, and reclaim them
from their special form of animalism and licence, “their irreverence
and undutifulness,” as you put it. Do you believe the Bible, Fan,
or do you hold that such injunctions as to preserve old landmarks
and not to forget our own and our father’s friends, are out-of-date
precepts—simply fit for Orientals?’
‘You are clever, Oliver,’ said Fan, coldly. ‘I cannot pretend to vie
with you in quotations misapplied.’
‘As the devil is great in texts—no, you don’t mean that,’ said Oliver,
trying to conjure back a friendly spirit into the dispute. He had
smoked his pipe and was knocking out its ashes. There was silence for
a time, and then he pointed out that the moon had risen unobserved
while they were speaking. It was flooding the landscape with a light
which, though it comes so often, never gives a familiar impression, but
always produces an effect wholly removed from that of ordinary light,
causing both heaven and earth to be changed for us, and to come out, in
their every aspect, a more solemn and grander sky, a sadder and fairer
world, than those we see by the beams of the sun.
Under the rays of the moon, the midsummer green of the Copley Grange
trees had grown dusky. They were massed together and cast deep shadows
over the turf, while the waters of the Brook flashed here and there
like silver by contrast. In the sky overhead the Pleiades were asking
who should bind their sweet influence? Orion the mighty hunter was
abroad. The Pole-star was glittering with his special effulgence.
‘How small those lamps up yonder, whose oil has never failed since
the creation, make a poor beggar and skirmisher of a day feel!’ said
Oliver, suddenly. ‘One would not say, either, that they disdain the
humanity they have given light to throughout the centuries. I am
not sure whether Friarton Mill is not jollier by moonlight than by
daylight. If all you said were true, Fan, what a compensation the
beauty of this place might still prove! I defy you to say that in one
respect, and that of all save the first importance, the lines have not
fallen to us in pleasant places.’
But she would not be appeased. Nature was not to her at any time what
it was to him; at this moment the perfection of the scene before her,
hurt her afresh, like a taunt added to a blow. ‘You will make me hate
this place,’ she cried reproachfully; ‘you will make me wish I had
never seen this house which was father’s house, where I have lived the
most of my life.’
He was sorry for her pain, but he was also disappointed and wounded at
her utter want of sympathy with him. ‘You have one resource left you,’
he said, with some hardness, which had not been there before, stealing
into his tone. ‘You can go away and leave me and the mill. My father
made sufficient provision for you, to enable you to act as you like,
and I will do all in my power——’
She interrupted him, turning upon him with a passionate protest. ‘Do
you think I could do it? Do you think I would leave you alone to bear
the penalty, though it may be of your own incurring? What do you take
me for? You do not know me, Oliver.’
‘That may very well be, since I do not believe your know yourself,’ said
Oliver, with a shrug. ‘But I am obliged to you, all the same, for your
magnanimity.’ He was really touched by her womanly love and constancy,
though he had been too much provoked to show it.
‘There is one question I am entitled to ask you,’ said Fan, more
calmly. ‘You admit you did not always mean to sink into a tradesman. I
know you had very different ideas when you went first to Oxford. What
changed you?’
He hesitated and did not speak for a moment. He did not deny her right
to put the question, but he did not know how to answer it. In many
things which related to his words and acts, he was by disposition a
frank and open-hearted man, but in proportion to his general frankness
were his particular reserves. He had sacred secrets which had to do
with convictions, feelings, and principles. He could no more turn his
nature inside out to his dearest friend where these were concerned than
he could consciously practise self-deception and social hypocrisy.
He was even shy with himself in dealing with the deep things of his
spirit. Still he owed some explanation to Fan, who had been the happy
confidant of the early dreams which had passed away like the morning
mist, and who now stood there in such estrangement from him.
‘Oh! all sorts of arguments came in and did their work,’ he said at
last, a little vaguely. ‘Some familiarity with learning bred the usual
contempt, I dare say. I was only her valet, and so she ceased to be
a heroine to me. I have grown a good deal older and wiser—let us hope
to begin with—and—well there was one affair which made a considerable
impression upon me at the time that I can speak of to you. There are
plenty of tradesmen’s sons who find their way to Oxford, but there was
just one other baker’s son who got there with me. He or his friends
for him made a grand mistake in somehow procuring his admission, under
false colours possibly, into a notably aristocratic college. I don’t
suppose his people had any very honourable aim in sending him to
college at all, at least he himself was a vain, weak fellow who thought
chiefly of acquiring associates—whom he called friends, in a rank of
life far above his own. I have no doubt he intended to cut the baking
trade entirely when he left Oxford, and that he hoped by means of his
fellow-Oxonians to hoist himself into polite society. For that end he
was willing to make himself generally obliging and useful, poor beggar,
to his temporary companions. He would help and back them in their money
transactions, cater for their entertainment, and bear more than his
share of the brunt of their scrapes.
‘That was to be the great business of his college life—with the
securing of a high connection for its end—not a very heroic end,
eh, Fan? But, to do him justice, he had no more natural turn for
study in any shape—classics, history, philosophy, or philology, than
nineteen out of twenty of his chosen patrons had developed in their
more favourable circumstances, or than had been shown by the whole of
his father’s journeymen bakers with their adverse surroundings. But,
there was not any more harm in him than being the wrong man in the
wrong place, which is not a very uncommon or heinous transgression,
though being that, he was a mean little flunkey. But the fault was not
altogether his, and he was good-natured and soft-hearted; though he was
idle, I never heard he was vicious. They said afterwards that he was
liked in his native town, and had been a good son and brother.
‘The fact of his father’s disgraceful trade had been kept in strict
concealment, and did not come out for some time. But when it did,
the enormity of the offence—though one would say that most people
are personally indebted to bakers who mind their business—together
with the low deceit of the concealment, proved far too much for any
poor popularity Tom Neaves had attained. The fellows he was amongst
could not get over the “rank impudence” of his intrusion into their
college, yet I should not wonder though they imagined they admired
Thackeray—“Less of a cad, you know, than Dickens”—and knew something
about George Osborne and “Figs.” They judged Neaves deserved to be
punished, and they sat upon him to give him his deserts, and above all
to get rid of him, as the officers of a crack regiment sometimes agree
to compel a wretched subaltern who is not of their set, and so is not
fit for their mess, to exchange or sell out. Of course in both cases
the affair is so managed as not to attract the attention or force the
interference either of a superior officer or a dean, and only what
are considered legitimate weapons are used against the common enemy.
Mind, Fan, I do not pretend that Neaves was without blame; and I am
perfectly aware that the young fellows who led the attack against
him, in their very contempt, did it more in thoughtlessness than in
malice. A few of them dropped his acquaintance summarily, as they were
perfectly at liberty to do. But the greater number settled to make him
their butt till he should endure it no longer. They assailed him with
a perpetual storm of allusions to his origin and practical jokes on
his father’s trade. They inquired gravely his opinion on dinner rolls.
They smuggled loaves into his gown. They showered as much flour upon
him from the windows of their rooms when he crossed the quad as ever
was scattered from a costermonger’s cart on a Derby day, or a Roman
balcony during the carnival. No doubt the wit of these gentlemen was
not very high-bred or unique in its expression; but what was lacking
in brilliance was made up in energy—the energy of a pack of boys, of
undergraduates—in teasing and tormenting their victim. Of course, if
Neaves had possessed sense and spirit he would not have minded a straw,
or he would have returned the aggressors scorn for scorn—if he had
not risen to the height of repaying them good for evil—and possibly
brought them to a more rational frame of mind. But unfortunately sense
and spirit were just the qualities in which poor Neaves was lamentably
deficient. He had already proved himself, as I have told you, a silly,
weak fellow, mortally ashamed of his father’s honest calling; therefore
his assailants hit him on the tenderest point, and had him at their
mercy. He struggled against the persecution for some time, tried to
behave as if he did not see it, then blustered a little, then knocked
under. To think such gnat-bites could drive a fellow with a soul in him
beside himself! They did; therefore his body was found floating in the
Isis one fine morning, down among the boats, not far from a place where
he had once, after his boat had bumped another boat, given a sort of
pic-nic, and boasted that the greatest ‘nobs’ of his college—the wild
younger son of a duke and an out-at-elbows young viscount—had been his
supporters. There was some confusion in the wording of the telegram
which broke the catastrophe to old Neaves. The family clung to the idea
that though an accident had happened, and their Tom was the sufferer,
he might still be alive. So the mother hurried to the spot along with
the father.
‘I chanced to see them after they had been told the worst and were
starting for home again to warn the rest of their children of what
was coming. The old man did not show what he felt, but the mother——I
tell you, Fan, every jury in the kingdom would, with justice, have
exonerated the perpetrators of the mischief from even so much guilt
as manslaughter, though one of them—I need not say he was not a
ringleader—took the misfortune so much to heart that he had to be
removed from Oxford to save his reason——and to this day when that
woman’s face comes into my mind, I think as I did then, I would rather
have been the wretched simpleton in his coffin than those men in the
flush of their youth and strength and whatever goodly birthright they
claimed besides. By Heavens, Fan,’ protested Oliver, in the passion
which had been gathering during his story, ‘what these fellows did was
the farthest removed from the chivalrous courtesy which was once held
to constitute gentle bearing, it was the grossest example of caddish
behaviour I ever came across.’
Fan was scared by the ghastly ludicrousness and grievous pathos of the
story, and by the degree to which Oliver was moved in telling it. She
had never seen him in his grief for the loss of their father betray so
much emotion as he did now, when he grew pale in the moonlight with
the violence of his anger, and clenched his teeth in the height of his
reprobation and disgust. ‘It was very cruel, very ungenerous,’ said
Fan, with a kind of shivering recoil. She crept close to her brother
and clasped his arm with her two hands, clinging to him. ‘They never
treated you so, dear?’ she asked with a gasp, as if seeking to reassure
herself.
‘Not they,’ he said with an awkward laugh, half ashamed of his
excitement. ‘My college was not quite so exclusive, and I trust I was
made of sterner stuff. If the men had chaffed me with a miff-wheel or
a rolling-pin, I should have replied, Yes, these were my arms, and I
did not see that something might not be said for them as well as for a
pair of wild men of the woods, a Moor’s head, a pirate’s ship, or an
assassin’s dagger. The gist of the matter is that if I lost some of my
ideals at Oxford I found others to replace them. Let us be thankful.
Come along, Fan; the dew has done falling, indeed, but I am keeping you
out far too late with only that rag of a handkerchief over your head.’