THE NEW TENANTS OF COPLEY FARM.
OLIVER was standing before the mulberry-bush in the mill-house court
watching the colony of white ducks which waddled up from the water and
claimed their right in the dropping mulberries.
He had stepped out of one of the windows of the parlour, which Fan,
with tacit reproach and soreness of spirit, had re-constituted the
family sitting-room. Since Oliver chose to be a miller and baker,
the old mill-house parlour was in keeping with his calling and good
enough for him. Oliver welcomed the change with much satisfaction
which escaped being damped from his want of full knowledge of what
was passing in his sister’s mind, and his absolute incapacity of
sympathising with it.
He stood hunching up his shoulders, his hands in his pockets. He was
bareheaded, so that the light summer wind lifted his hair, blowing it
across his forehead as near his eyes as the shortness of the locks
would allow, without discomposing him. The same wind every moment
plucked off and strewed about the last full-blown red and white rose
petals and reversed the leaves of the mulberry and the willow round
the corner, turning their white sides uppermost and silvering whole
branches at once.
Oliver was wondering why he should feel any particular pleasure in
contemplating the ducks wriggling their short necks with delight,
rolling about like ships at sea, quivering their tail-tufts of
feathers, making rushes to snatch the beaded maroon morsel, each
duck from his neighbour, at last gobbling down the mulberry with an
intensity of relish which in its breadth of display was farcical in the
extreme. But Oliver did find so much satisfaction in the spectacle that
he was tempted to propose to take Sally Pope’s office out of her hands,
and feed the ducks from their basket of mill refuse every morning.
They would soon learn to know his step and voice as they knew Sally’s.
Pooh! it was all egotism, to be gratified by a duck’s recognition. It
was a thread of vanity which in Rousseau reached the diseased pitch of
imagining that the sparrows were chattering jibes at him. But how much
more lovable, after all, if less respectable, was a vain man or woman
than your Lucifer or Luciferina who made a boast of his or her proud
indifference!
Oliver was aware that he had a sneaking fondness for approbation. He
would have liked Ted Green and every hulking hobble-de-hoy about the
mill, as well as Fan and Sally Pope with her subordinates, to have a
real regard for him and trust in him. He would have liked old Jim Hull
and the men in the bakehouse to believe that he meant them well, and
would serve them no less than himself, if he could. It was a weakness
of course, and all that he was likely to get for his pains, was that
everybody would incline to suspect him of being a humbug where he was
not a fool, and no one would understand that he was setting himself,
according to his light, to be a good citizen, though the effort in his
case went in some respects against the grain.
Catherine Hilliard had plenty of sympathy and admiration to spare for
every good citizen and patriot, a history of whose achievements got
between the boards of a book; nay, she wasted interest and regard on
some patriots of rather doubtful complexion—Count Egmont and Camille
Desmoulins, for example. She only saw them in their dress-coats and
revived togas, as the men figured in print; she could not guess that
in their dressing-gowns and slippers, or what stood for their undress,
the fellows were self-indulgent and ‘rough customers’ enough, like
ordinary men. But a simple tradesman was nobody in Catherine’s eyes,
because his ambition reached no higher than to give back to his branch
of trade that integrity and excellence which ought to be the crowning
distinction of all honest trade in an honest—not to say a Christian
nation—because he would magnify his peculiar field of work and make it
honourable, feeding the people with material food convenient for their
bodily life, as Frederick Perthes, the prince of booksellers, strove
in his day to raise the book trade of Germany and sought to feed the
minds and hearts of his countrymen with spiritual food. It was a trifle
to her that the faintest approach should be made to elevating whole
classes, with regard to which the present absurd and dishonouring creed
was that no member could rise without abandoning his homely trade and
his fellow-traders. In the name of Heaven, if the craft were honest,
could it not be ennobled in its loyal performance? Had it not been so
with many a craft, such as those of the goldsmith, the weaver, and the
dyer, now treated with comparative contempt, in old burgher towns and
free cities, when the craftsmen were men of genius, skill, and taste
far advanced in civilisation?
People might tell him—Oliver, that such an ornamental craft as that
of a goldsmith, for instance, requiring notable skill and taste, was
one thing, and a purely useful business like that of a baker, was
another. But he was prepared to show that the fine arts were very far
from being what their idle amateur worshippers, not their true and
humble disciples, represented them to be, in the economy of a people.
He did not cry down art or learning, perhaps it would have been easier
for him, on the whole, if he had appreciated each of them less. Yet
bread—not art—was the staff of life, and One who had come among them
as the King of men had not thought it beneath his Divinity to work
miracles in order to give common bread to hungry multitudes.
There was a notion current among competent authorities, that the
physique and stamina of English men and women, especially in the large
towns, were undergoing a gradual disastrous deterioration. If this
were true and arrived at its natural culmination, the world might
not fare the better for the lapse of that portion of the Anglo-Saxon
race which had elected itself, in its more vigorous days, the pioneer
of civilisation and the champion of liberty all over the world.
Unadulterated food—which also inferred less craving for intoxicating
drink—better lodging, legislation which should enact and compel freer
space, purer air, fresher water, and the light of day, ought to do
something to arrest the progress downwards. But the great hope, under
God and his Son, lay in the recovery of true manliness and womanliness;
to work—not dream—for the love of the work, and not for the wages
alone; to be in the world as one who served with a will; to recognise
fully that life did not consist of its lower gains, equally Philistine
whether they belonged to a respectable bank-book or a disreputable
betting-book. For when one came to the rank materialism of the
things, it did not so much signify whether the object of desire and
attainment implied being made secretary of state or mayor of Friarton,
churchwarden of St. Philip’s or deacon of the chapel, or whether it
descended to the lower level of the possibility of drinking champagne
on occasions, as a variety on unlimited gin-and-water.
Oliver was brought up short in his cogitations. He heard footsteps and
voices approaching, and conjectured they belonged to two men whose
figures in grey suits and wide-awakes he had seen ten minutes before,
from the other side of the Mill, making their way through Copley Grange
Park. He had remarked the new-comers particularly, since he had not
heard that the Squire had come home, and visitors from that quarter
proved comparatively rare when the family were not at Copley Grange.
The Mill had to put up with the plague of its picturesqueness, and
Oliver found himself called upon to display the good citizenship he
so insisted upon, in giving up a portion of his privacy to render the
picturesqueness public property. He did not come out of the ordeal
without flaw. Certainly, he refrained from inaugurating his reign as
many another good citizen has inaugurated his, by erecting barriers
where his father had raised none. Oliver objected to calling his
mill his castle, and defying anybody who was not on mill business,
and with whom Oliver was not on speaking terms, from approaching its
time-mellowed walls. Therefore he scouted Ted Green’s suggestion to
keep a watch-dog, even on chain, and for the protection of the outlying
sacks of wheat and flour.
But Oliver Constable did not show himself remarkably cordial to
absolute strangers, especially when they came from Copley Grange. On
the contrary, he avoided them almost as resolutely as Fan did. He would
make a point that the place should be free to the Dadds and Polleys of
Friarton, or, for that matter, to any inhabitant of the town; for he
earnestly wished that his fellow-townsmen of all classes—the lower the
better—should profit by the rural beauty of Friarton Mill. But perhaps
Catherine Hilliard was right when she said that he looked upon those
persons who were not happy enough to belong to the trading class as
outside his purpose. Indeed, Oliver Constable’s relations with the
upper ten at Oxford, and all he had insensibly acquired from them, only
rendered him more determined to have nothing to do with them. He waged
no war with his superiors in social rank, but their respective paths
lay wide apart. There were plenty of tuft-hunters and eager satellites
struggling in the wake of the objects of their homage without Oliver’s
adding himself to the number. Indeed, there was danger in the
association; for the mere conception of another social atmosphere had
spoilt Fan for her world, and her world for Fan. It should not spoil
him—at least, so far as his work was concerned. It is very difficult
for an ardent reformer to steer clear of partisanship.
On the present occasion Oliver put up his back, and turned it in its
rounded form on his company. At the same time he accomplished a feat in
balancing himself, while winding one long leg round the other, much as
if he were borrowing a pattern from a duck now standing at ease on a
single leg before him.
‘That’s our man,’ said a genial voice behind him. ‘I thought I knew the
back, and the attitude nails him beyond mistake. Constable, what are
you doing here?’
Oliver could not lend a deaf ear to the enquiry; besides, he wondered
who was making it. He wheeled round, and saw that the two figures in
grey he had spied from a distance, had developed into two men—with whom
he had been on terms of slight acquaintance, though they had not lived
in his set, at Oxford. But what was a bare acquaintance on the banks
of the Isis threatened to assert itself as a positive friendship up in
Holmshire, on the threshold of Oliver’s mill.
When Oliver considered Harry Stanhope’s rashness and thoughtlessness,
Oliver felt he had not a moment to lose. He had never concealed his
antecedents like poor Tom Neaves, but he must now state roundly what
they had led to, before Harry swore eternal comradeship on the spot,
and poor Horace backed his brother in this as in all else.
‘What am I doing here?’ echoed Oliver, with a laugh. ‘Everything. I am
in my proper place. This is Friarton Mill, and I am the miller.’
‘Well, this is a go!’ said Harry, without the least attempt at the
concealment of his surprise. ‘Isn’t it awfully jolly, Horry?’ The
brother appealed to nodded in confirmation of the extreme jolliness of
the situation, which Oliver was slow to perceive.
‘I never knew these Stanhopes had such a feeling for natural scenery,’
said Oliver to himself, puzzled at his acquaintances’ manner of taking
his communication. ‘I thought—give Harry a rowing path or a hunting
field, and he would ask no more, while the other had not a mind of his
own. But I suppose they admire this,’ and Oliver glanced around him
complacently.
But Harry was ready to supply a different explanation of his
enthusiasm. ‘I knew you hailed from a farm or a mill, old fellow,’ he
said, lightly; ‘but I always thought the “’Varsity” old wives were
starching and stiffening you, preparatory to turning you out a parson
or a schoolmaster. I am glad you knew a thing worth two of that. And
Horry and I are in great luck to unearth you here.’
Oliver still remained in a fog as to what the luck could consist of,
unless Harry had private views on the fishing in the Brook, and counted
on Oliver’s making it sure to him. There was one piece of hospitality
which, as Oliver was not really a churl, he did not see he could avoid
dispensing. He must invite these fellows into the house to join Fan’s
tea-table. He hoped Fan would forgive it, because they were old college
men—not merely sightseers.
‘You don’t ask what brings us here,’ said Harry—clearly eager to tell
his secret. ‘Why, we are nearly as much at home—at least we shall be
soon—as you are. We are the new tenants of Copley Grange Farm. Horry
and I are going in for being English yeomen instead of Ceylon coffee
planters, as our governors intended we should be. The doctors found
Horry’s liver would not stand the tropics, and as the old man and I
have always stuck together, the entire project fell to the ground. We
made up our minds to rough it at home instead of in the colonies—to
descend a few steps in the ladder here, instead of crossing the seas
to do it there. Horry and I ain’t either swells or snobs, and we
haven’t got handles to our names to make the descent more difficult. We
thought we should like nothing better than to become yeomen—since we
were not born squires and could not very well be gamekeepers or grooms
without ceasing to continue our own masters. There are no English
regiments—the more’s the pity—such as the French used to have, into
which gentlemen cadets could enlist without losing caste altogether,
and being reduced to associate with the scum of the streets and the
fields in the guard-room. Any people that we have left, to speak of,
are all settled in the northern counties, well out of the reach of
the trial of coming across Horry and me driving in a market cart,
and selling our own pigs. For that matter, princes of the blood and
dukes are pleased to play at being farmers, and I do not see why poor
gentlemen may not slide down gracefully into the real thing. We are of
age and can do what we like, but we have also persuaded the uncles and
aunts into giving their consent to our taking this farm and investing
our princely capital in it. We have got a good bailiff to put us up to
the wrinkles, and we mean to go the whole hog.’
‘You haven’t asked my advice,’ said Oliver, ‘but I am afraid it won’t
answer—this won’t answer, Stanhope.’
‘Now, look here, Constable,’ argued the sanguine advocate, ‘you think
we are going in for being gentlemen farmers, and so will fall between
stools, but it is nothing of the kind. Didn’t I say we were going
the whole hog? Whatever that appropriate phrase may mean, we are to
learn to do everything for ourselves, just as we should have done in
Queensland or Natal. It is not the season for holding a plough, else I
should have tried it to-morrow. But we are in time for the first crop
of hay, and we are to help at the harvest. Won’t it be jolly fun, like
a page out of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” which somebody gave me to read
when I had scarlet fever at school a century ago—only I am afraid the
Miss Primroses are still more out-of-date, and will not show among the
haycocks next week. We thought of doing without a woman-servant, and
making our own beds and cooking our own grub. But since old Horry is
not as strong as a horse like me, we judged it better to change our
coats by degrees.’
‘You were right there,’ said Oliver, asking himself whether Harry
Stanhope were a greater young fool than he, Oliver, had ever taken
the trouble to rate the lad—the most thorough-going donkey Oliver had
encountered—whether Harry were in earnest or simply talking bosh,
knowing it to be bosh all the time? And if there should turn out to
be some foundation for what Stanhope was telling him, as, after all,
Oliver had no reason to question, here was a fine complication of the
difficulties of his position in these fellows establishing themselves
on the next farm to him, with the deliberate intention, however
wildly carried out, of exiling themselves from their own class and
naturalising themselves in Oliver’s! He did not for a moment entertain
the idea that the Stanhopes would aid him in his aims. The young men
would simply import their own faults and follies into a sphere in
which the brothers had neither part nor lot, while they would assuredly
ruin themselves in a pecuniary sense.
‘I say, Constable, you are a nice liberal-minded, benevolent fellow,
not to speak an encouraging word to two poor beggars seeking to better
themselves,’ interposed Harry Stanhope—partly in chaff, partly with
a deeper meaning in his words. ‘You are trying on the supercilious
dodge. But what would you have us turn our white hands to?’ holding up
a pair of paws very brown and a good deal hacked about the knuckles.
‘We haven’t got any brains to speak of, between the two. Our education
has been neglected, what with private tutors and Oxford. Poor Horry
was bowled out without any fault of his as soon as the wicket was set
up,’ he lowered his voice and said the last sentence in a cautious
undertone. ‘We are a likely pair to shine in the learned professions,
ain’t we?’ he resumed, with fresh spirit and light bravado. ‘All the
people who have the misfortune to be connected with us have been in
despair about what was to become of us ever since we were small shavers
in petticoats. Indeed, I fancy it was rather a mistake our being here
at all. They might have disposed of me in a marching regiment, where I
might have had a fair chance of being comfortably knocked on the head
and decently put out of sight, in a fashion becoming my station. But
the Maori or Zulu, or whatever gallant native gentleman was to do the
deed, must have looked sharp about it, else I was tolerably certain to
go to the dogs or the Jews and create a scandal in the mean time. I put
it to you how could I have helped it, Constable? I could not flatter
myself, and what was more no groaning old fogey of a relation could
cherish the forlorn hope that I was endowed with the genius of keeping
out of debt and rising in the army, while all the time I should
belong to a set who might be tailors’ sons and duffers of various
kinds, yet would, for the most part, have ten and twenty guineas to
spend in proportion to my one. Then we were two,’—here he dropped his
voice again, and spoke more quickly to hide some under-current of
feeling. ‘By Jove, I was not going to leave _him_ in the lurch, to
be recommended to board and vegetate in the country with one of your
needy parsons, as if Horry were a lunatic, or to be treated as a poor
relation, and a hanger-on at other men’s tables.’
The speaker, whom Oliver had known incorrigibly light of heart and
light of head in a world where even youthful beards are beginning
to wag with ominous seriousness, finished with some genuine though
repressed indignation.
The listener could not refuse to Harry Stanhope the credit of fidelity
to the solitary obligation he had owned—that of honest brotherly
regard, and of a certain amount of reason in his statement.
However, before Oliver could make any amends, Harry Stanhope set upon
him again with his mixture of confident assertion and gay banter. ‘I
should call it a shabby trick to treat us as intruders in your ranks,
even if you yourself were not the greatest humbug going. A reading man
and a prize man, to pretend to grind at any other stuff than Latin
or Greek or German philosophy! I bet you I could do it a great deal
better myself without so much as being coached beforehand. There was a
song I used to sing about the miller who “was drowned in his own mill
dam,” and I remember a couple of farces I have seen played on country
town boards and at circuses. There was a miller of Brentford who rode
like Dick Turpin, and there was a Scotch beggar who pounded a king at
Cramond Brig. I could take the parts in private theatricals any day. I
am not sure, indeed, whether I am not better cut out for the _rôle_ of
a jolly miller than for that of a heavy farmer.’
‘You do not know what you are speaking about,’ said Oliver, hotly, ‘if
you identify _bonâ-fide_ millers with stage ruffians.’ Then he was
struck with the absurdity of quarrelling with Harry Stanhope on such
a count. ‘Come along with me,’ he said, abruptly; ‘I’ll show you a
mill-house and my sister will give us some tea, if you don’t prefer a
glass of ale.’
‘Thanks,’ said Harry with cheerful alacrity, ‘either will be uncommonly
acceptable. We are as hungry as hawks and as thirsty as washer-women.
She won’t mind our muddy boots—will she? We have been trying to make
out the boundaries of our fields, and it saved trouble and felt
professional to walk in the ditches, instead of the growing corn.’
Oliver was dubious that Fan would mind more than the muddy boots in
the unceremonious addition to her tea-table, but he was in for it, and
it could not be helped.
Harry and Horace Stanhope were the grandsons of an impecunious English
peer. The boys, together with an only sister, had been left orphans at
an early age with small patrimonies to fall back upon. The children’s
kindred and guardians had been, as Harry represented them, a good
deal at a loss what to do with the lads in those hard times, where
slenderly-provided-for sprigs of the aristocracy are concerned. It
was far easier to deal with the girl, the interest of whose portion
would pay the expenses of her education and furnish her with dress
and pocket-money at a modest rate afterwards, while a childless aunt
undertook to give her a home and bring her out in society until she
attained her natural goal, a suitable establishment. But not only were
the two lads destitute of any special ability which should make up
for their lack of fortune among their compeers, one of the brothers,
Horace, the elder of the two, though he was always put second to Harry,
had started in life heavily weighted in any race for worldly success.
From the effects of an illness in childhood in which the infection was
caught from his younger brother, Horace had contracted a degree of
deafness, not enough to reduce him to an ear-trumpet, but sufficient to
put him at a serious disadvantage in the ordinary routine of school and
college, and in social intercourse.
The two brothers had always been inseparable; but though they formed a
marked instance of fraternal alliance, they were as unlike in person
and character as devoted friends sometimes are. The very nicknames
bestowed on them at school and college, which burlesqued their close
association, referred as often to the contrast as to the union between
them. They were dubbed not only ‘Romulus and Remus,’ and ‘Hengist and
Horsa,’ but ‘Valentine and Orson,’ and ‘Day and Night,’ or any other
couple of terms linked yet opposed to each other, which schoolboy and
undergraduate wits could compass. Harry was a fair-haired, sun-burned,
comely young athlete, great in muscular development, the popular
champion of boat-races and cricket-fields, though he had not reached
the eminence of figuring in his university’s ‘eight’ or ‘eleven,’ and
so had been denied the crowning glory of forming one of the heroes
in any spring or summer at Putney or Lord’s. He was so frank and
cordial, so honestly heedless of his own interests, no less than those
of his neighbours, that it was hard, even for men as unlike him as
Oliver Constable was, to resist altogether the influence of Harry’s
involuntary good fellowship when they happened to come in contact with
it.
Horace was sickly, sallow and stunted, with a good deal of the captious
testiness and jealous moroseness which are said to distinguish
unfavourably the mass of the victims of deafness from the bulk of their
fellow-sufferers from blindness. Horace Stanhope was as hard as Harry
was easy to get on with, and if left to himself would have held aloof
from his fellow-creatures as sedulously as Harry cast himself with a
disarming confidence on their sympathy. The single exception Horace
made was in favour of his brother, between whom and himself there had
existed a strong attachment—cemented by the curious attraction of
extremes—since the two young men were babies.
Harry saved his brother from utter isolation. The silent saturnine
lad, shut out by one of the chief doors of the senses from joining
in much of human effort and enjoyment, whether ‘at kirk or market’
or by friends’ hearths, transferred his active share in the struggle
of life and in its joys and sorrows to his brother, and vested and
centred in Harry the main part of Horace’s ambition, pleasure, and
pain, apart from what was purely physical. He elected to live as it
were vicariously, to take his experience by proxy. In accordance
with this choice, wherever Harry went, Horace followed at his
heels. Harry’s friends—and he was pre-eminently a young man of many
comrades—making them for good or for evil wherever he went, Horace
immediately adopted—although they might be as unlike him as he was
unlike Harry—in Horace’s silent, rather cantankerous fashion, which
caused his friendship to prove somewhat of an infliction to Harry’s
congenial associates. Whenever Horace shook off the heavy fetters of
his infirmity, and, instead of being doggedly indifferent, showed
himself alert and interested, one might be sure it was in something
that concerned Harry.
The dedication of Horace’s blighted life was made mutely even with
regard to himself, for his was a nature as shy and reticent as it was
tenacious. And it was an undreamt of mystery to Harry’s transparent,
unreflective disposition. Harry had only an instinctive sense that poor
old Horry would be lost without him—Harry. Why, his was the only voice
which, while still pitched in a natural key, Horry could distinguish
without difficulty—and did not that point plainly to the conclusion,
insisted the sapient Harry, that the two were meant to hang out
together? No, no, a wife, though she were ten times a beauty and an
heiress, could not induce him to cut the connection. And the advantage
was not all on one side, Harry went on to argue—for he was generous in
his youthful flush of manliness—he himself was like one of those little
fellows who are put out in repeating their lessons, if the youngsters
have not a pet button to finger. Now, Horry was his button. Harry
was convinced he could not get a single inning at cricket, or play
billiards save like a muff—horrible misadventure!—if he did not have
Horry to look out, or mark for him.
This was the pair whom Oliver Constable brought to Fan’s tea-table that
summer afternoon.
Fan received the strangers with very formal courtesy, until Oliver
mentioned them more particularly as fellow-Oxonians, when she suddenly
brightened all over and became gracious to the tips of her fingers, and
there was something specially flattering in Fan Constable’s earnest
abandonment of graciousness.
Oliver groaned a little privately—going off as he did on a wrong cue.
All women were led captive by good looks and winning tongues, and Harry
Stanhope was a bonnie, pleasant boy enough to serve for the pair, to
extend his passport to yellow-skinned, turned-tempered Horace. But
Oliver would have thought that Fan had more sense than to be carried
away by the eyes—granted that in measuring Harry from head to foot,
they found a sop for their individual weakness in the fact that his
whole air and every movement, no less than his clothes—rough and
ill-used, from his battered wide-awake to his muddy boots—belonged
originally to no farmer’s ‘cut,’ but were the bearing and dress of a
better-born, better-bred man.
But all the same, Oliver comforted himself with reckoning Fan would
be thoroughly disgusted when she learnt the young man’s precious
scheme. For if Oliver had wounded her sense of propriety by sticking to
their father’s trade from worthy motives, must she not be scandalised
outright by the Stanhopes’ mean-spirited desertion of their post and
voluntary abasement simply to save themselves from the trouble of
shaping a career and securing a provision for their wants in any other
fashion?
Oliver had not yet gauged the depths of a woman’s inconsistency. He
found himself twice deceived in his clever man’s egregious simplicity.
When Fan was told the news that the Stanhopes had become the tenants of
Copley Grange Farm, she grew radiant, and threw herself into Harry’s
mad project with positive enthusiasm.
Oliver looked on and listened with open-eyed wonder. He had not
objected altogether to his sister’s being won over to cordiality
towards the Stanhopes as his former associates. He had noticed with
ready approval how she had set herself to entertain Horace—as most in
need of entertainment, taking pains to raise and modulate her clear
voice to suit his deafness, and striving to find subjects which he
might care to discuss. It was the innate gentlewoman showing itself in
Fan as in all true women of whatever rank, which caused her, in the
office of hostess, to select the guest who was least attractive and
most apt to be neglected, and to lavish on him her chief cares. Oliver
had admired the delicate consideration which lay at the foundation of
a lady’s duty in this respect. He had also appreciated the tact which
had helped Fan to discover soon that her little attentions only bored
Horace, since he preferred to be let alone. The perception caused Fan
to turn and join in Oliver’s conversation with Harry. Then her brother
was amazed and certainly not edified to find that Fan, in spite of her
declared opinions, was warmly applauding and even, as it seemed to
Oliver, proposing to back Harry Stanhope in his enterprise. ‘Oliver
will be so glad to have you and your brother for neighbours;’ she put
the sentiment quite gratuitously into Oliver’s mouth in his presence;
‘and if he or I—sometimes a woman’s ideas are of some value where
housekeeping is concerned—can be of the least service to you, we shall
be very much pleased.’
Oliver could not believe his ears. It was not that there was the
least suspicion of forwardness or indecorum in Fan’s spontaneous
friendliness. The girl was perfectly incapable of such breaches of
good taste. But it was evident to anyone who knew her, that Fan was
interested and excited—to the extent of being carried out of herself,
in sheer sympathy with an adventure, which any reasonable man or woman
might have held as certain to provoke her contempt.
Sally Pope, coming in herself to remove the tea-tray, in the
accidental absence of another servant, could not refrain from casting
a questioning glance at Oliver. That appeal of Sally’s eyes said, ‘Do
you see Miss Fan? She is coming out of her shell for once in her life.
What makes her, that is so ill to please, so rarely taken with what the
talkative young gentleman is saying?’
Indeed, Fan’s ordinary quiet, reserved manner in society was
transformed as Oliver had never seen it before to a stranger, though
he had always been aware that it masked an ardent temperament. She
was exclaiming brightly, in answer to Harry’s far from discriminating
praise of the mill-house parlour. In fact the lad’s satisfaction,
though he was guiltless of any intention to produce such an impression,
gave Oliver Constable the impression that the family sitting-room
reminded Harry, in a confused not disagreeable way, of the parlour of
one of those rural alehouses which his pursuits had led him to frequent
a good deal.
‘I am so happy to hear you like this room,’ said Fan, ‘because the
parlour at Copley Grange Farm’ (which any impartial person would have
pronounced greatly inferior in Oliver’s judgment, and which Fan had
been in the habit of holding in very low estimation) ‘is just such
another homely, old-fashioned place. I must believe they have their
merits, since they strike you favourably. You have always been fond
of a country life, you tell me; then I think you will like being a
farmer. Hay-making, of course, is charming, and bean-hoeing is not
bad—to watch, at least. And you will take a deep interest in your
cattle and poultry, won’t you?’
‘What has come over Fan,’ was Oliver’s dumb protest. ‘_She_ never made
hay in her life. I did not suppose she condescended to observe there
was a species of pulse called beans. As for ducks, she only considers
them in the light of furnishing dishes for the table. I am convinced
she has not looked into a duck’s nest, or fed the ducklings afterwards,
since she was herself a chick of five years old.’
In the meantime, in answer to Harry Stanhope’s fervent assurance that
he luxuriated in all country work and adored every kind of live stock,
Fan was saying, almost wistfully, she appeared so anxious that he
should not be disappointed in his ridiculous experiment, ‘And you will
not mind that you are tenant instead of landlord?’
‘Not a bit,’ answered sanguine Harry, who had not minded anything, save
not getting his play, since he was born.
Oliver was inclined to tax his sister with insincerity and with
indiscretion in pledging them to support Harry Stanhope in his
delusion, the moment the visitors left. But before he could begin, Fan,
still in high spirits, took his arm and walked him out to the garden.
Half of it was already in cold shadow, while in the other half the long
slanting rays of the sun were kindling the low beds of pink saponaria
into a rosy red, shining through the blue cups of the nemophila—warming
them to the tone of the summer sky, performing a fine process of
silvering on the white bells of the tall campanula.
‘Isn’t it jolly?’ demanded Fan, taking the first word, in her delight
departing from her correct Queen’s English, which was generally as
perfect as Becky Sharp’s French. ‘To think that two of your old college
friends should come and settle in this way on the very next farm to
us!’
Was it the simple rebound from the mortification with which she had
seen herself and him turned back to the old vulgar, illiterate circle
of the tradespeople of Friarton, which caused Fan to clutch at a straw,
and induced her to open her heart to the Stanhopes?
‘Nice!’ growled Oliver. ‘You are a nice sensible young woman to think
so. It will be the greatest nuisance going. In the first place, the
Stanhopes are not friends of mine—don’t run off with that big blunder
at starting. They were once in a reading-party under my charge—a
beastly drag they proved, and we nodded and exchanged a word or two in
the meadows or on the water from that time. That is the head and tail
of our friendship. Nobody but Harry Stanhope would have made a claim
upon it.’
‘But you acknowledged the claim at your own door,’ said Fan, quickly;
‘and are you not gratified by his turning farmer?’ she added,
innocently. ‘It is quite in your own way, and I admit that in him it is
romantic.’
‘In my way!’ cried Oliver, losing breath at the injustice of the
assertion; ‘in my way to intrude where I am not wanted! And you to
welcome romance! You, who boast you are the most matter-of-fact girl,
who defend the commonplace ambition to rise in life, to cut trade, to
go in for a profession—which requires a smattering of Greek and Latin,
or a speaking acquaintance with civil or ecclesiastical law, or with
drill and musketry—to wear a wig, or a cassock, or a red coat—the last
strictly on parade—without the smallest title to put on either—to
dine at seven or eight instead of one o’clock, and look down, with
the intense snobbery of a deserter from his ranks, on the class of
shopkeepers! You, Fan, who scout any ambition which has a wider scope
and a less selfish aim, and call it either high-flown or low-lifed,
equally despicable in both lights.’
‘But Mr. Stanhope is not proposing to be a shopkeeper,’ said Fan,
with narrow literalness; ‘and don’t you know a gentleman, a dozen
generations deep, can do anything?’ she asserted, defiantly, gathering
a cluster of heliotrope and smelling it.
‘It is the first time I ever heard such a sublime dogma from the lips
of anybody who fell short of being an idiot or a scamp,’ retorted
Oliver.
‘Oh! my dear, dear boy, how can you be so abominably rude?’ said Fan,
driven to laugh outright at his vehemence.
‘A gentleman’s birthright must be worth having,’ snorted Oliver,
still in towering indignation. ‘It is a pity he does not improve the
advantage oftener by doing something which deserves to be chronicled.
And if he fails, what can be expected from the _canaille_ who buy and
sell?’
‘Oliver, don’t pretend to misunderstand me,’ remonstrated Fan,
relapsing quickly after her short flight into her customary
earnestness—even with her proneness to feel aggrieved, getting angry on
her own account; ‘you know very well what I mean.’
‘I defy anybody to arrive at the meaning of so contradictory a person,’
said Oliver, growing cool as she waxed hot, picking up a stone and
aiming it at an audacious sparrow on a neighbouring bough.
‘You are perfectly aware,’ explained poor Fan, with laborious
iteration, ‘that I consider a man who has had the education of a
gentleman, and lived in the society of gentlemen, is qualified to
belong to their rank if he will.’
‘Thanks; I quite agree with you there; we only differ in what
constitutes a gentleman.’
‘Then let us agree to differ,’ said Fan, coming down from her stilts
for the moment, and making an overture towards reconciliation. ‘Don’t
quarrel any more this evening. I really want you to tell me if you
think Clarke is right in this border, for I can never make up my mind.’
Oliver’s opinion was at her service, as his hands and feet would have
been if she had cared to employ them. And he agreed with her that the
dispute had gone far enough, when it was assuming too sharp a tone.
That evening impressed itself on Oliver Constable’s mind, as certain
days and nights which, in themselves, at the time, have offered no
elements of distinction to arrest and excite us, stand out through
all our subsequent histories. He could recall each incident and
feature afterwards. The fact that he was the person to introduce the
two Stanhopes at Fan’s tea-table, the characteristics and doings
of the little incongruous group which gathered in the mill-house
parlour—fair-haired, broad-shouldered, sanguine Harry trotting out his
chimera; dark, narrow-chested, melancholious Horace leaning forward in
the shadow to catch Harry’s words, and his alone, content in the middle
of his natural scepticism to accept and act on Harry’s version of their
prospects; Fan’s rapid conversion to Harry’s views and the effect
his influence had on her; with Oliver himself playing the part of a
critical and condemnatory chorus to the others—all remained legibly
written on Oliver’s memory. And the second act in the garden was
preserved to his consciousness in the same involuntary manner. He did
not forget its smallest accessories—the low sunk sun touching the beds
and borders with a final glory, and shining dazzlingly in his eyes and
Fan’s, while she was unwontedly gay, and he quenched her gaiety by his
savageness. Yet the two had ‘fallen out’ and made it up again, as even
the most affectionate brothers and sisters will do, thousands of times
before, without the circumstances making the smallest mark on his mind.
Harry Stanhope was well accustomed to find himself a favourite with
women; and he was of an age and temperament which inclined him to repay
the obligation impartially and liberally. But there was a fascination
to Harry, little as he was accustomed to analysis, in the manner in
which Fan Constable’s dignified reserve melted at his approach into
a proportionate depth and wealth of cordiality. He had a perception
that the conquest of her formal coldness was not a common occurrence,
and was flattering to his bearing and address. And somehow the lad,
with his volatile disposition, had a capacity which Oliver Constable
did not possess, of fathoming and rightly estimating a woman’s nature.
Fan’s brother, who had known her all her life, might accuse her most
erroneously of changing like the wind; but the stranger, who had only
known her an hour, guessed, without being in fault, that steadfastness
was the key-note to her character.
‘A famous acquisition Constable’s turning up at Friarton Mill will be
to us,’ Harry announced complacently, if brokenly, between puffs of his
pipe, when he and Horace trudged over to such accommodation as had been
improvised for them at their farm. ‘We have fallen on our feet. There
is not only Constable, an old acquaintance and a man to be trusted—all
the more that he is apt to be as crusty as any governor’s port—there
is Miss Constable, an awfully nice girl and thunderingly ladylike to
boot. Upon my word, Horry, if millers’ daughters are like that, I
don’t wonder at fellows getting spoony and spouting verses about them,
and I do wonder at fine ladies holding their own. What a pair of eyes
she has got! as dark a brown as those of “Pin Him,”’ naming with fond
regret the supreme pet of the host of dogs which had in their time
called Harry master, which, having passed away from earth to the happy
hunting ground of dogs, was farther exalted in her late owner’s fond
imagination. It was an immense compliment from Harry when he compared
Fan’s eyes to the orbs of the departed ‘Pin Him,’ and when he added
with pensive meditativeness, ‘I dare say she would prove just such
another little brick in standing by her friends. How kind she was after
the first ten minutes!’
‘I think Constable might have had the hospitality to offer to put
us up for the night till the rest of our traps turned up,’ objected
Horace, querulously. The poor fellow had an unfortunate constitutional
instinct by which he invariably laid hold first of all the flaws
in an encounter, or an individual. ‘The sister ain’t a bouncing,
barn-door specimen of a woman such as one might have expected from the
surroundings. But it struck me there was rather too much starch and
buckram about her, to begin with, for good form—not to say the real
thing.’
‘Oh, come along, old Diogenes,’ cried Harry.