LOUISA AND CATHERINE HILLIARD.
‘YOUR settling down here as a tradesman, Oliver, will be a nice story
for Mrs. Hilliard and Catherine,’ said Fan Constable, tartly, over
the breakfast-table next morning. For Fan was by no means permanently
converted, however touched for the moment, by the last evening’s
conversation.
Oliver shook himself with some vigour, but the gesture was so common
with him as not necessarily to imply any special depth of feeling
stirred by the observation; however, his colour rose as he spoke in
answer.
‘What will Mrs. Hilliard and Catherine make of it? what can it be
to them? At the same time Mrs. Hilliard puts little weight on social
distinctions; you must do her the justice to grant that, Fan,’ he
said, looking straight across the table to his sister, and speaking
with a degree of emphasis which implied that, in his opinion, Fan was
not in the habit of judging righteous judgment where Mrs. Hilliard was
concerned. ‘As for Catherine,’ he added, after a moment’s pause, ‘I
imagine she is too much in the clouds, as usual, to take much notice of
what happens on the common earth.’ He said the words with an attempt at
carelessness, but in reality he spoke with an effort, stiffly.
‘Oh, it may suit Louisa Hilliard to profess that she is indifferent
to public opinion and independent of it, that she is a privileged,
irresponsible person, in short. But you are greatly mistaken if you
think you will escape her gibing tongue and impertinent laughter.
And you will find to your cost that when the matter is of the least
importance she will take care to comply with the world’s standard.’
‘I don’t wish to stand between any genial soul and her jest,’ said
Oliver; ‘and I am sure, Fan, you need not quarrel with respect for
social standards.’
‘I don’t quarrel with it,’ said Fan, decidedly. ‘I think that whatever
the social standards of the past may have been, social standards in our
day ought in the main to be deferred to by all sensible people. What I
object to, naturally, is that you should insist on running counter to
them in order to indulge in a wild dream.’
‘I plead guilty,’ said Oliver.
‘As for Catherine Hilliard,’ Fan went on, ‘she is not too much “in the
clouds,” as you call it, to prevent her coming down among ordinary
people and saying very stinging sarcastic things. Louisa is only too
well content with herself and her belongings; but I think Catherine
Hilliard is a discontented girl.’
‘The level of “a low content,”’ muttered Oliver, gratifying his
father’s old, half-blind, half-deaf English terrier ‘Ned’ with a
sardine.
Fan did not catch the quotation, or notice the typical act: she was
leaping to a conclusion. ‘Catherine Hilliard is so dissatisfied with
herself and everything around her, that I fancy she will learn to
welcome any change of circumstances, until she may get the length of
selling herself and her feelings some day. Then, no doubt, after the
bargain is completed, she will turn round and decide that this gain
also is not worth a tithe of what she has paid for it.’
‘You have no right to speak so, Fan,’ said Oliver angrily. ‘Of course,
I don’t pretend to guess how Catherine Hilliard may dispose of
herself,’ he went on more calmly; ‘but she has always appeared to me
a kind of nineteenth-century vestal virgin, a “Christian priestess of
Nature” and such letters and art as have come in her way. That is not
the sort of creature who sells herself.’
‘I beg your pardon, Oliver.’ Fan contradicted her brother with mingled
dignity and obstinacy.
‘And I beg your pardon, Fan.’ Oliver perpetrated with considerable
success a mimicry of his sister’s manner.
‘There,’ he said quickly, ‘as you are always tempted to be unfair to
the Hilliards, we had better let the subject drop.’
Fan did not protest against the charge of unfairness, or insist on
prolonging the discussion. Perhaps her conscience pricked her a
little. She was perfectly sensible in the truthfulness of her nature
that Louisa Hilliard was her _bête noire_. Fan used to say to herself
without disguise, ‘I can’t bear Louisa Hilliard.’
This was one of the instances of natural antipathy and comparatively
causeless dislike, which, like the opposite examples of instinctive
partiality, and hardly warranted attachment, were apt to hold sway
over Fan Constable’s ardent, concentrated temperament. Hers was not
an unjust or undisciplined character, while it was loyal to the core;
but it was full of ‘likes and dislikes.’ There was nothing lymphatic
or volatile about Fan, to her great loss of ease and tranquillity. If
she had been put under an examination as to the provocation she had
received from Mrs. Hilliard, who was Fan’s remote kinswoman and early
patroness, Fan could not have given any save the pettiest reasons of
which she herself would have been the first to feel ashamed. Yet her
asperity where this woman was concerned amounted to rancour. Sometimes
the sentiment in her own bosom struck Fan as unchristian, and being
very sincere in her Christianity, she sought to qualify her enmity by
solemnly assuring herself of what was the truth—that she would not
injure Louisa Hilliard for the world. It was only incidentally that
Catherine Hilliard came in for her share of the dislike which Fan had
to Catherine’s cousin. The two younger women possessed nothing in
common, but neither had they any sharp points of antagonism. If it had
not been for Fan Constable’s extraordinary aversion to Mrs. Hilliard,
Fan would have viewed Catherine Hilliard with simple indifference.
Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin kept house together, chiefly upon Mrs.
Hilliard’s income, at the ‘Meadows,’ which was at once the largest,
and, though it sounds a contradiction, the cosiest, certainly the
prettiest, of the villas which had sprung up on the outskirts of
Friarton. The ‘Meadows,’ in fact, was more of a small country house
than a villa. It entitled its occupant, unless she were a very
objectionable person otherwise, to revolve in the first of the social
circles—which, like the sap-rings in the trunk of a tree, divided the
townspeople into various grades of enclosure. Nay, the ‘Meadows’
entitled its owner to hover on the verge, which she crossed not
infrequently, of the county families.
For Mrs. Hilliard was only objectionable in possessing a carelessness
of mind—a rather pronounced Bohemianism. She was regardless of who
took her up or who let her down, which had an effect the reverse
of what some people might have expected. As she was also a lively
agreeable woman, superficially refined, a well-endowed, comely widow
of thirty-five years of age, who relished her freedom too keenly to
have any thought of marrying again, but who kept a pleasant house and
welcomed her friends to it, she was lifted clean above the ebb and
flow of social fickleness; she was landed in established popularity
with _carte blanche_ to do very much as she pleased, and fill up her
visiting-list just as she chose.
In fact, Mrs. Hilliard’s house was what the vicarage often is in
country society, a sort of neutral ground and meeting place for
different classes—or degrees of classes, in the community—not that its
mistress would descend so far as to receive ordinary tradespeople and
fraternise with them, Fan now reflected, gloomily. Yet Mrs. Hilliard
had opened her doors to the brother and sister since they were a mere
boy and girl, and had in her turn visited at Friarton Mill. And she had
not come exactly as the Fremantles and Wrights, the dignitaries of the
Grammar School, had come, because the mill family, so far as it had to
do with Oliver, might be regarded as in a transition state, and on the
point of taking flight into higher regions; but because Mrs. Hilliard,
though a well-born, well-married woman, the daughter of a rural dean
and the widow of a commodore, was really distantly related to the
Constables through their mother. Mrs. Constable, as Fan never forgot,
had been the daughter of a clergyman, not a dissenting minister but
a regular parson of the Church of England. But, after all, there
are clergymen and clergymen even of the Church of England. The poor
curate who had been Mrs. Constable’s father had lived and died in very
different circumstances from those of the comfortably situated rural
dean to whom Mrs. Hilliard had owed allegiance. The curate, to begin
with, had stooped and married the daughter of a yeoman, who on his part
had not enjoyed any of the plain plenty apt to be associated with a
great farmhouse. Accordingly, the curate’s brood of children had been
brought up in a spare as well as homely fashion, until they had been
sent out into the world to earn their living, and make their own way,
as clerks and nursery governesses; one of those governesses, with her
limited education and still more limited earnings—not to be compared to
a good cook’s wages—was found not unwilling to exchange her anxious
dependence and drudgery for the serene independence and importance, in
her own sphere, of the mistress of Friarton Mill. Strange to say, the
fact of the slight tie of blood between the two women failed to prevent
Mrs. Hilliard from settling at Friarton when the Meadows offered itself
to her and her man of business—at once as a good investment for her
spare money and a suitable house which she could make a home.
Stranger still to relate, Mrs. Hilliard was too secure of her position,
and too defiant of censure, to ignore for a moment the thread of
relationship between herself and the Constables of Friarton Mill. On
the contrary, she proclaimed it openly with evident cold blood whenever
she had occasion to do so, compelling confidence and respect in her
hearers. For if Mrs. Hilliard could afford to make light of, nay, to
sport, her far-away cousinship to the family of a provincial miller and
baker, her acquaintances might rest on the conviction that she had
substantial claims on their regard in much closer alliance with the
families in canons’ houses in cathedral closes, in government houses
abroad, in pleasant little houses near Hyde Park or at Kensington. But
in reality the eccentricity belonged rather to the idiosyncrasy of the
woman than to the remoteness of the relationship which she elected to
count with the Constables.
Mrs. Hilliard had been ready to hold out her hand to the Constable
young people, which was one of the offences Fan, though she could not
dispense with the hand, had not been able to forgive. This was not pure
perversity and ingratitude in Fan Constable. It was the result of the
observation that Mrs. Hilliard laughed, without taking the trouble to
conceal it, at Fan’s serious pretensions, and that the older woman was
as little, as the younger was much, in earnest.
The Meadows was a wide white house, cheerful in its whiteness, and,
at the same time, amply shaded and sheltered by old and luxuriant
shrubberies, of which the Portugal laurels, Irish yews and hollies were
giants of their kind, while the lilacs, Guelder roses, and syringas
offered, in their season, pyramids, piles, and thickets of flowers.
The public rooms were all on the ground floor; and, in the case of the
drawing-room, the long French windows, which faced the south, opened
to the lawn with its clumps of rhododendrons and brakes of thorns,
and its glimpse in mid distance, through an archway of roses, of the
flower-garden.
The drawing-room at the Meadows was the sunniest, most cheerful room in
a house the great distinction of which was resolute, sometimes slightly
overpowering, social sunshine and cheerfulness. Mrs. Hilliard used to
call it an ‘Omnium Gatherum,’ a flagrant instance of eclecticism where
rooms were concerned. Its furniture, and the occupations she engaged
in there, did not date beyond her own reign at the Meadows, and so
would have been pronounced worthless by connoisseurs. But, as Mrs.
Hilliard maintained, she had lived long enough to have seen several
styles of decoration and ladies’ work, and her drawing-room proved with
what catholicity of spirit she had ‘gone in’ for each in succession.
The only drawback was that she could not make up her mind to be
entirely off with the old love in order to be on with the new. Thus she
sacrificed the great aim of the last exposition of high art—unity, to
her unprincipled softness of heart and lack of sternness of purpose.
She retained the cold whiteness and pompous glitter of the upper part
of her walls, and the undue warmth of colouring and floweriness of
her carpets—attempting to combine them with dirty orange dados and
sage-green _portières_, just as she kept the faded gorgeousness of
her Berlin woolwork in stripes of bold embroidery divided by bands of
imperial purple and emerald-green velvet, or in great groups of Queen
of Sheba flowers like the exuberant flower-pieces of Flemish painters,
introduced into close contact with the dim, delicate conventionalities
and studiously faint, long-drawn-out effects of nineteenth-century,
art needlework. It was a highly objectionable compromise from an
artistic point of view, but somehow it was not only saved from absolute
frightfulness, to a Philistine it had a charm of its own, because of
its little bit of mellowed, blended life—such as one may occasionally
meet with, on a grand scale, in a pile of building which began by being
a feudal castle, and went on to be an old English manor-house, then
progressed into a Georgian mansion, ending by proving the many-sided
home of a race. So time with lingering fingers had toned down and
tempered the robust gaudiness of the abused Berlin woolwork till it too
had acquired something of the exquisitely soft harmonies of ancient
tapestry. That was Catherine Hilliard’s opinion, and she had a fine
eye for colour. The chairs and tables, the books, the pictures and the
china in the room, were all about as incongruous, and yet all in a
manner represented some phase and echo of human life, and had come to
fit into each other.
So much could hardly be said with regard to Catherine Hilliard and her
surroundings, as she stood listlessly looking out of one of the long
windows on the lengthening shadows falling across the lilac flowers of
the rhododendrons, and waiting for her cousin coming in to afternoon
tea. It might be because Catherine belonged to all time that she did
not belong particularly to that room—in which, however, the window
where she stood with its round table, heap of books, letter-case and
blotting-book, work-basket, and Nankin jar holding a bunch of purple
and pink and white pea-blossoms, constituted Catherine’s sanctum and
private properties.
Catherine Hilliard was a young orphan cousin of Louisa Hilliard’s,
who, when she left school with a bare competence, had been invited by
the mistress of the Meadows to share her establishment. Catherine had
accepted the invitation on the stipulation that, in proportion to her
more slender means, she should pay her share of the joint housekeeping.
‘Catherine is such a dragon of pride for a young girl,’ Mrs. Hilliard
explained to anyone who had a right to be made acquainted with the
details of the arrangement, ‘that I dared not propose to her to come
and live with me and let me keep house for both. Yet she might have
the sense to guess that her company is a boon to me, though she has
little sympathy with my pottering commonplace ways, and lives in an
intellectual world of her own. It is my single regret with regard
to Catherine that she is a bit of a blue stocking.’ But though Mrs.
Hilliard professed and half persuaded herself to believe the contrary,
in reality she neither objected to Catherine’s contribution to the
general expenses nor to the different line she took in society. Mrs.
Hilliard’s hand was not so open that it had not its seasons and
occasions of closing, and she did not care to run the risk, slight
though it might be, of a rival in her special field.
Altogether the arrangement, which had continued from the time that
Catherine Hilliard was eighteen, up to the present date when she was
in her twenty-third year, had answered admirably. Mrs. Hilliard was
the reverse of exacting, and she was even forbearing and indulgent
where Catherine’s dissimilar tastes and habits were concerned. On
Catherine’s side she was not so ignorant and abstracted in her want of
knowledge of human nature and absorption in her own pursuits, as to be
unaware how much colder and more forlorn a place the world would have
proved to her, if Mrs. Hilliard had forgotten their cousinship and had
not extended to the girl an older woman’s friendly protection, and
given her a home with a member of her kindred. Catherine cherished
in silence and reserve sentiments of gratitude and affection for her
cousin Louisa, and was a good deal more under her influence than could
easily have been supposed. But there was a hitch—what miners call
‘a fault’—between Catherine and ordinary humanity, the consequences
of which were so plain that Fan Constable, who was not in the other
girl’s confidence, could read them though she could not trace them to
their source. Without near ties, without clear, positive duties—apart
from the obligation to keep the ten commandments and lead what she
understood of a Christian life, Catherine Hilliard was thrown back
and in upon herself, which, unless as a discipline to teach her how
insufficient she was for any achievement she really valued, seemed
about the worst experience she could have encountered. She was like a
plant withdrawn from the wholesome, common, out-of-door influences
of sun, rain, wind, and a touch of frost, while the plant is at the
same time subjected in one part of its cellular tissue to the strain
of over-stimulus and over-cultivation. Though Catherine lived in a
house full of lively movement, with many comers and goers, though
she was on excellent terms with the house’s mistress and its circle
or circles, the girl remained always like an unfamiliar visitor in
what served her for a home. She was only in, not of, its circles.
Catherine’s was largely an inner world of fancy and feeling; its
scenes furnished by the vivid representations which she drew in her
mind, of places and incidents met with in her books; its characters,
ideal personages, ghosts and shades—goodly ghosts and heroic shades,
no doubt, but destitute of the substantiality and warmth, and what is
salutary even in the provoking contradictions, the piteous failures,
the tough warfare of flesh and blood. There was a certain bloodlessness
and fantasticalness about Catherine’s world, amidst much that was
noble and sweet in it. She had an aching consciousness of a hollow
emptiness about it, and not of a gaping void alone, but of a harsh
discord between it and the actual world. She felt herself getting more
and more fastidious and captious and—she feared—horribly selfish. She
moped a good deal, as well as mused. She dreaded instinctively she
knew not what, as the result of her star-gazing and hero-worship.
She was conscious she shrank from the common work-a-day world and
from the vulgar and mean interests—often, of ordinary people with
the common business of life on their hands. But she did not know in
the least how to give up her habits, or reconcile herself to society
as she found it. She was helpless in the bondage she had made for
herself—yet she was frequently more weary and disgusted with herself
than she could possibly be with any other person. But Catherine had
one great resource against morbidness, though she repaired to it as
to other occupations, either listlessly, or with a fitfulness in her
temporary eagerness, resorting to it with no distinct comprehension of
what a safeguard it was to her, from the consequences of the continual
exercise of those faculties which were already over-wrought.
Catherine was exceedingly fond of animals, and she happened to be
free to express her fondness, since she was not merely the mistress
of half-a-dozen pets of her own, she was the sovereign protector
of the whole animal kingdom as it existed at the Meadows. She was
likewise the head-gardener on the spot. For Mrs. Hilliard had nimbly
seized the opportunity of a floricultural tyrant’s throwing up his
good situation, in a fit of pique, to get rid of her hired oppressor
permanently. She had then vested in Catherine supreme authority over
a junior gardener and a boy who were well broken in to obedience.
The only obligation which Mrs. Hilliard had imposed on her cousin was
that she should not indulge her predilection for Shakespearian flowers
in the beds, and untrimmed luxuriance in the shrubbery, to the extent
of banishing every choice pelargonium and perfectly quilled dahlia,
which had formerly crowned Mrs. Hilliard with honour at flower-shows;
neither should Catherine be guilty of corrupting her subordinates to
the degree of reducing the grounds to the picturesquely disorderly
level of the gardens of a French or Italian country house, so ruining
the established reputation of the Meadows for the trimness which is the
English gardener’s delight.
Catherine, always overwhelmed as she was, not with bracing work,
but with a dreary surplus of vacant time on her hands, in spite of
her reading, was fortunately capable of revelling, in her desultory
fashion, in this double resource. She would leave Dante in the saddest
region of the Inferno, the Jungfrau when the Black Knight had her
at last, Mary Barton pursuing the outward-bound ship, Janet in the
agony of her repentance, to take refuge in her own section of the
living world. She would play for half-an-hour with Pepper and Crab
or the youngest kitten. She would watch the eight rooks whose big,
black-coated presence always seemed to Catherine to lend a solid
dignity to the fry of small birds, just as the rooks’ deep cawing
supplied a solemn diapason to the lighter music of the orchestra in
the shrubbery on a bright morning in spring, or a quiet evening in
early summer. Catherine stoutly maintained the innocence of the rooks
against the respectful representations of the modest under-gardener,
that the birds did not confine their bill of fare to worms and the
wide genus grub, as she was fain to assert. And after all, the alleged
depredations committed by the rooks, were as nothing to the frightful
accusations brought against a pair of demure sinners of Cushat doves,
which were like the apple of Catherine’s eye, for whose condescension
in coming of their own sweet will and building a nest in an old Scotch
fir, and their affability in indulging in soft cooings, she could never
be sufficiently grateful. Catherine scouted the idea of replacing the
wild pigeons by a couple of their tame kindred, which should be housed
in a neat little pigeon-house, submit to be fed with grain and crumbs
from feasts, or fly far a-field for their meals instead of proceeding
with the marauding instincts of the most incorrigible of thieves, and
alas! in spite of their sleek, iridescent plumage, and the tender
sentiment associated with them, of the greediest feeders belonging to
the feathered tribes, to devastate whole rows of newly-sown peas and
‘breaks’ of young cauliflowers.
What did Catherine care for peas and cauliflowers compared to her
Cushat doves? But Mrs. Hilliard, though she found some food for
laughter in the doves’ exploits and Catherine’s dismay, was not so
indifferent to the wreck of her vegetables. Catherine was very much
obliged to Oliver Constable for telling her, though it was in a
measure another disillusion in the way the information was put, that
wood-pigeons were the most arrant cowards in addition to being the most
disgraceful thieves, for the most transparent sham—the least life-like
scarecrow—sufficed to hold the robbers at bay.
Catherine was as well acquainted with every bird’s nest within her
bounds as were the Friarton boys, whom she could not keep out of the
shrubbery in the bird-nesting season, and whom she detested with an
illogical detestation—to say the least, enough to show that she had
never had a brother. She would suddenly start out on these boys from a
little wilderness of green branches, and assail them with a torrent
of passionate reproach. The boys would stare blankly at the apparition
they had aroused, but any unwonted bashfulness, if excited at all,
would speedily give way to a sense of the utter disproportion between
cause and effect. The result would be an ironical titter or guffaw
(for the Friarton boys were by no means models of good manners), and
a noisy, careless retreat to be followed by a return rendered doubly
certain by Catherine’s injudicious challenge.
Catherine retreated too, covered with swift mortification for her
extravagant anger. But it was difficult to be patient with those young
savages, who could no more be barred out than the waves of the sea
could be held back, who would make short work in one holiday afternoon
of all those exquisite little homes of moss and leaves, leaving the
poor, fond, helpless architects fluttering in despair round their
ruined dwellings and pillaged treasures of blue, green, black and
red spotted, and freckled eggs, or, more precious still, downy,
yellow-beaked, tottering, gaping fledglings. The nests were perfectly
beautiful and sacred to Catherine, and she took great pleasure in
visiting them all round every morning, with elaborate precautions
not to disturb family arrangements or trouble heads of houses in the
performance of their duties.
Catherine was almost as happy and much less liable to worry, among
her lilies, of which she cultivated an infinite variety; her trailing
love-lies-bleeding, like a warrior’s plumes heavy and drooping with
the red stains of battle; the golden shields, with the dark discs and
the stiff grenadier stalks, of her sunflowers; the pinked perfection
and spicy breath of her clove carnations. She would hang over each
of them, and touch them with a lingering, fondling touch, as if they
were sentient creatures, and could welcome and respond to a friendly
caress. She hated to shorten their brief blossoming time; she would
never gather them with lavish wastefulness. She liked to have them near
her at all times, and so would take a tribute from their abundance to
‘busk’ her person and the Meadows drawing-room, but she never did it
unsparingly and recklessly.
Catherine Hilliard was of the middle size, but looked taller than she
was from the slenderness of her figure. Her hair was of that dubious
colour which enemies called red, friends auburn, and gushing admirers
golden. In reality it was each tint as the light fell on its simple
braids and twists. Her complexion was fair and pale—too waxen, in
spite of her bird-herding and gardening, for perfect health. Her nose,
mouth, and chin were well and softly moulded. But the results of her
temperament and circumstances were visible in her personal appearance.
There was a languor which had no vital purpose to conquer it, evident
in her air, that threatened to drain away the last remnant of what
ought to have been the healthy hope and joyousness of her years. Her
mouth had a sensitive, plaintive droop. The expression of her eyes
varied continually from hesitating dreaminess to spasmodic enthusiasm,
from short-lived enthusiasm to intolerant scorn, from quick scorn to
morbid depression. The beauty of Catherine Hilliard’s face, as it
struck strangers, dwelt principally in the dark blue of her eyes.
Withal, she was by no means strictly beautiful, only endowed with a
peculiar charm for those on whom the charm worked at all. She had a
fancy for gowns of thin material, in their season, like summer clouds
floating round or clinging to her, according to the atmosphere, in the
dry heat of noon, or in the slight dankness of the dew point. But she
preferred the colour of her gowns to be softly dark like the clouds
after sunset, thus instinctively rather than deliberately setting
off the fair paleness of her complexion. She kept her cousin Louisa
marvelling where Catherine could find so many misty purples, heather
browns, and cool slate colours, as well as naval blues, of a wire-woven
texture. Catherine wore a gauzy gown of a deep plum-colour at this
moment.