HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A YEOMAN.
Harry Stanhope was welcomed with open arms by everybody in Friarton,
and Horace was more than tolerated for his brother’s sake. Fan
Constable had struck the key-note of public opinion in this England
which some people call democratic, when she said that a gentleman
‘generations deep’ could do anything, always supposing he did it with
characteristic grace, and win golden opinions on all sides. What Oliver
Constable was condemned and ostracised for attempting to do, because
he did it out of loyalty to his class, a deep sense of duty to his
kind, and the most practical form of Christianity, Harry Stanhope was
universally applauded and caressed for trying to accomplish in his
burlesque fashion in an idle whim, certainly with no other motive, save
that of serving himself and Horry.
It was no matter that Harry far outdid Oliver in the liberty he took
with the world of Friarton. Oliver only went to his mill and his
shop, seeking to revive his old familiarity with business details,
and planning how to bring to bear upon them his version of trade
principles. He contented himself with reviving his acquaintance with
old friends of the family in a conventional enough way, simply making
it plain that he acknowledged their obligations and was content to take
his place in their ranks.
But Harry flaunted his descent from the squirearchy to the yeomanry in
the most outrageous style. He ‘went the whole hog,’ as he had said. He
was like the stage misanthropes who growl and gibe till men doubt their
sincerity, only Harry’s blue eyes were too round and limpid for one to
suspect them of depths of hypocrisy. He meant everything he did while
the fit was upon him. He was in earnest so far as he knew, when, like
hermits in general, he went far beyond the original professors in his
actions.
Harry with his shadow, Horace, not only dined at twelve, sometimes in
the fields in close proximity to his workers, and supped at seven,
he made his own hay, whether the sun shone or the rain fell—not to
the benefit of the hay in the latter instance, drove his own carts,
galloping the cart-horses to the injury of these sober-minded animals,
and led the hoers among beans and turnips with an impartial energy
which threatened to demolish alike crops and weeds. He laid aside the
civilised encumbrance of a morning coat, as if he were engaged in
perpetual cricketing and rowing matches. He walked with a pitchfork
over his shoulder as some squires carry a spud, when the tool was
quite unnecessary. And he did what no yeoman within a radius of many
miles of Friarton had thought of doing within the memory of the oldest
inhabitant—he came into the town in character, in his shirt-sleeves,
riding a bare-backed horse, as he had been taking it to water, when
it had flashed across his mind that he might be in time to intercept
the post letters—not that Harry’s letters were of any particular
consequence, either to himself or other people—or that he ought to
look after a job which was in progress for him at the saddler’s or the
smith’s. He actually astounded the assembled Friarton market, he did
not scandalise it—nothing which Harry could do did scandalise his
neighbours—by entering it in such primitive guise. He had made up his
mind, to begin with, that to be a yeoman at Copley Grange Farm was the
same as being a colonist, and the more he brought his establishment
and personal practice to what Harry conceived to be the colonial
level, the more refreshingly novel the play was, and the more he
enjoyed it.
Horace did not adopt all Harry’s new customs, for the sufficient reason
that Horry was a sickly fellow, unable to cope with Harry in braving
fatigue and exposure to the weather. But Horace not only found no fault
with his chosen champion in his antics, the brother liked the changed
life, and was the better for it in body and mind, because Harry, while
he was still tasting its essence, and skimming its cream, enjoyed it
with the lad’s naturally huge omnivorous appetite for enjoyment, and
Harry’s enjoyment was always more or less infectious where his nearest
friend was concerned.
The infection spread to more than Horace when Harry came into Friarton
Town, in the fancy dress which he had taken into his head to wear,
whistling or singing aloud in his fine baritone, though the song was
of no higher musical or intellectual calibre than ‘The Two Obadiahs,’
with sheer lightness of heart and gleefulness of spirit, the very
pessimists, in the habit of finding the foundations of the world out
of joint, and holding life to be stale, flat, and unprofitable, were
won to smile, as well as to sigh. Harry Stanhope was such a goodly
spectacle in the flush of his youth and strength and exuberant spirits,
if one could but forget that there came a term to these magnificent
animal gifts, and a just reckoning for the days of their triumph.
After all, the recollection only lent a wistful charm to all that was
fleeting in Harry’s glory.
It was not merely those who were closest to his own class—the
Wrights, Fremantles, and the vicar’s family—who delighted in Harry
and conspired to spoil him as the finest young fellow in the world,
perfectly charming, so delightfully natural, frank and unpretending,
so imperturbably good-natured in accommodating himself to the
difference in his position—though, to be sure, he could not forfeit
his birthright. It was not merely Fan Constable who beamed on Harry
as on a gay and gallant deliverer from the social depths into which
Oliver’s extraordinary recantation had consigned them afresh. At the
same time, Fan alone saw meeting in Harry, in the strangest, most
fascinating manner, both the confirmation and the contradiction of all
her early predilections and aspirations, until, in mingled conviction
and reaction, she was ready to honour gentle breeding more than ever;
while she became in a way reconciled to Oliver’s flight, which appeared
to coincide with Harry Stanhope’s course. She began to feel dubious
whether Oliver were so entirely wrong as she had supposed, whether
he were not following, without guessing it, a veritably noble and
knightly impulse in his raid against modern trade dragons, and his
search for the San Graal in the homeliest quarters. That dim undefined
notion, whether true or false, did much to restore Fan’s equanimity
and cheerfulness. What did it matter if the Wrights and Fremantles,
who were so frightened for hazarding their own debatable footing,
turned their backs, when Harry Stanhope lent the Constables the far
greater weight of his support, and constantly directed upon them his
laughing face, coming to Friarton Mill ten times oftener and on twenty
times more friendly terms, than Oliver with his contradictory spirit
authorised?
Yet Oliver too, in spite of himself, liked the lad for the very
qualities which were the furthest removed from Oliver’s own—the
boyish thoughtlessness, sanguineness and absence of any sense of
responsibility, the half-kindly and wholly confiding selfishness which
impressed on Harry the rooted belief that the whole world revolved,
somehow, round him and Horry, and was in a manner made for their
gain or loss; the half-audacious goodwill which made Harry claim,
so unhesitatingly and in such a large measure, the goodwill of his
fellows. Harry was as free from self-consciousness as he was mercurial,
and the summer sun warmed him through and through, without his being
ever troubled with a shiver of repulsion, or a groan of obligation,
in the view of wrongdoing and retribution on every side. Oliver was
tempted to admire as well as to despise, to covet while he condemned,
Harry’s monstrous exulting egotism.
After the first shock of his sister Fan’s inconsistent secession to
Harry Stanhope’s side of the question, Oliver looked on, without
surprise, if a little sardonically, and witnessed Harry’s unbounded
success in Friarton.
For the very Dadds and Polleys, who cherished a deadly distrust to one
of themselves that had penetrated to a higher sphere and professed
to return to his own, fraternised in a manner with the intruder,
called him ‘the right kidney,’ a pleasant young gentleman as ever
lived, taking his frolic as he was free to do. Bless you, he could not
really let himself down, be he ever so willing. His people and his
class would see to that. It was only his way of making fun. He was
a gentleman-farmer, like the lord-lieutenant, or as the late Prince
Consort had been, though he amused himself with aping the old yeomen.
And he had no fad of raising up the middle-class, any more than he had
of leaping over the moon. He gave himself no airs of superior wisdom
and virtue. It was only that he could make himself happy anywhere, and
had an agreeable word to say to everybody; while nobody was such a
donkey as to mistake Mr. Stanhope’s manner or presume upon it.
Old Dadd laughed loudly at Harry’s pranks, recalling old members of
the gentlefolks he had known who drove coaches and made walking tours
in sorry disguises for bets. He entertained Harry himself with these
reminiscences, to which the lad listened with his usual affability, old
Dadd standing hat in hand the while and Harry forgetting to bid the
draper cover his head in the mock yeoman’s presence.
Jack Dadd was enchanted when Harry not only enrolled himself a member
of the cricket club, but presided over its entertainments in the
‘Admiral Keppel’ afterwards. Here was an adherent worth having, an
authority as ready as he was great, from his unimpeachable advantages,
on sport and horseflesh. It was rather in pure enthusiastic homage to
his gifts and attainments, than in lurking sycophancy, that, though
Harry was fain to render himself hail-fellow-well-met to his new
associates, Jack began by deferring to him unfeignedly, and headed
the other members in cheerfully acknowledging Harry’s born supremacy.
The would be man of the people accepted the unsolicited tribute as a
matter of course, and not at all as if he disliked it. On the contrary,
he showed a very fair capacity for playing the cock of the roost in
addition to his other performances.
And only Oliver Constable groaned over these indications of what would
be the sort of alliance formed between Harry Stanhope and his adopted
class; how the members of widely severed sets in society brought
together through self-interest and for self-indulgence, would play into
each other’s weaknesses, and simply work out their mutual lapse and
loss.
Strict disciplinarian as Mrs. Polley was, she did not object to her
girls giggling at Harry Stanhope’s exuberant chaff, and exultingly
accepting bets of gloves and ribands with him, in which the Miss
Polleys were always the winners. Mrs. Polley did not exactly understand
that Harry Stanhope, who at his present stage was incapable of being
anything else than boyishly friendly and merry with all women, had
chaffed in precisely the same manner the barmaids of his earlier
acquaintance. Mrs. Polley herself smiled broadly on Harry’s jokes, and
called him ‘a good sort,’ a perfect gentleman, none of your stuck-up
pretenders—unquestionably Harry was not a _stuck-up_ pretender.
The one dissentient voice in Friarton was that of Catherine Hilliard.
When her cousin Louisa took the brothers under her wing, as if Harry
needed the protection, and doted on the youngest, she would have had
Catherine dote on him also. Mrs. Hilliard was too good-naturedly
selfish, too hilariously cynical, too well occupied on her own account,
to be a regular match-maker, supposing there had been scope for
anything save sick match-making in Friarton and the neighbourhood.
But she would not have objected, from the first hour she spent in the
company of the would-be yeoman, to making up a match between Harry
Stanhope and Catherine. Mrs. Hilliard would have lost her cousin as
a constant companion, but she would have found a jovial ally to her
heart’s content in Harry. And if the attractive young man’s worldly
wisdom was not his strong point, that was Catherine’s look-out, not
Mrs. Hilliard’s. He would form the most hospitable and genial of
kinsmen and neighbours, if he might not have all the qualifications for
a safe husband. On the other hand, the contrast between Catherine and
him was all that could be wished. It would do Catherine a world of good
to have her bookishness—detestable in a woman—her untenable notions,
her chillness and asperity, routed out of her by a gay-tempered,
easy-minded husband, whose easy-mindedness might not preclude the
wholesome discipline of any amount of obtuseness and stubbornness, when
interference with his masculine prerogatives was in question.
But unfortunately, Catherine could not see the beauty of the contrast
between herself and Harry Stanhope, as establishing an incontestable
point of union where the two were concerned. ‘He is no better than
an overgrown boy,’ she said, with a half-weary scorn. ‘He has not a
thought or care beyond his pleasure.’
‘My dear, that is what is so particularly nice about the boy,’
remonstrated Louisa Hilliard. ‘You and many other people are weighed
down with care, and the consciousness of care, to no purpose. What we
specially want at this epoch in human history, is a robust faculty of
enjoyment.’
‘I think I prefer the poor deaf fellow,’ said Catherine, in her spirit
of contradiction. ‘He loses his identity in that of his brother.’
‘Is that such a boon to the world, to lose one’s self and live in one’s
neighbour’s life?’ asked Mrs. Hilliard, shaking her head in merry
incredulity. ‘I am not sure that it might not prove easier and more
comfortable, on the whole, to be another than to be myself. I should
feel so deliciously neutral, you may be sure—nothing could touch me
very nearly. Your toothache would tingle quite bearably, suffered by
reflection through my nerves.’
‘I don’t think it is quite so with Mr. Horace Stanhope,’ said Catherine
coldly. ‘I don’t suppose you understand, Louisa.’
‘Not I, farther than that it is not in _you_ to go with the multitude,
either for good or evil. Child, I am certain it is for good, and to our
credit, when the rest of us heartily admire and like a fine, manly,
friendly fellow like young Stanhope, and I should have thought—though
I am not super-subtle in my intuitions—that you would have valued him
for standing by the poor creature his brother; whom, with what I must
call a morbid taste, you set yourself to prefer to the fairy prince in
his own person.’
‘What!’ exclaimed Catherine, ‘value a man for caring for the dog which
is fonder of him than of anything else in the world?’
‘Well, there is a proverbial estimate of “a dog’s life,” while there
are many good sorts of men that kick their dogs occasionally, when they
need chastisement,’ speculated Louisa, maliciously treading on one of
Catherine’s hobbies.
‘Yes; and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals exists
for the punishment of men’s brutality,’ said Catherine, with her pale
cheeks flushing.
‘My love, the Society has to do with ruffians—let us trust they are
comparatively rare. You are speaking like a girl who has been brought
up by maiden hands, who expects a man to behave like another girl
such as herself, not to say like an angel. She does not take into
account his different nature and rearing, together with his greater
temptations; she shrieks hysterically, and calls his least faults by
preposterously exaggerated names. Men who have nothing to do with her
either laugh at her, or fall into ecstasies over her baby innocence.
But woe betide her and her husband—should she consent to take such
a necessary appendage—if she will not open her eyes, and submit to
know a little more of the world. You must accept an older woman’s
word for it, Catherine, that a man may kick his dog when the animal
is troublesome; he may even swear a little at his wife, under great
provocation, and yet neither be absolutely barbarous nor profane.’
‘There may be something in what you say with regard to the wife’—began
Catherine, in perfect sincerity, but was stopped by the laughter of
Mrs. Hilliard.
‘For shame, Catherine, to prefer a dog to a man—or rather to a woman.
Never mind, there is another respectable old saw to draw inferences
from, in this case: “Love me, love my dog.” No doubt you are paying
Harry Stanhope the most delicate of compliments in your favour for
Horace.’
Catherine disdained to reply to the insinuation.
But though Catherine declined to add to the number of Harry Stanhope’s
worshippers, she appeared, like the other women, to be drawn into his
court where he stood the centre, next to Mrs. Hilliard herself, of the
bright stirring drawing-room at the Meadows. Catherine’s imagination
tempted her to speculate, with however little hope, on the diversities
and vagaries of human character. A new type arrested her, as an unknown
specimen stops and holds fast the naturalist. Harry was strange to her
in the sparkle of his bold thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness and
pure and simple egotism. The qualities were all naturally repugnant
to her, still they attracted her curiosity for a time, as qualities
which she had never met before, and might never meet again, in the
same degree or combination. Catherine, too, looked and listened as
if carried away with the charm when Harry, nothing loth, figured as
the hero of the hour, recounted his youthful exploits by flood and
field, volunteered, without a grain of shyness or scruple as to the
acceptableness of his service, to be at the beck of any and every woman
present—for Harry was no languid, supercilious, fine gentleman. He was
a gallant cavalier to the heart’s core. He only asked to be allowed
to help every woman, while he helped himself liberally to the first
place in her regard. But he was the reverse of the odious cowardly
personage—we may trust he figures more largely in fiction than in real
life—the lady-killer, professed or unprofessed. All was open and above
board with Harry; and upon the whole his attentions were too impartial
to have much individuality or to be invested with special danger. It
seemed as if he consented to be heard or seen for the entire sex’s
benefit, as he span his yarns—not particularly original, wise or
witty, but with an indescribable charm in them, due to their fresh
lightheartedness—of his school and college frolics: his prowess at
‘hare and hounds;’ how he was a bogie to his dame; his surreptitious
introduction of ‘Pin Him’ into his quad; the row he had been in when
town fought gown; the wrinkle he had been able to give such an awfully
clever fellow as Tyler in making up for the private theatricals at
the Wests—whose place was near Harry’s cousins. Then he sang his
songs whenever they were wanted; songs less aggressively warlike and
sportsmanlike than the songs of Jack Dadd and the other peaceful
counter-jumpers—sometimes love songs, or songs expressing passionate
memories, and tender yearnings, with fiery depths, and pathetic echoes
which Harry Stanhope had never fathomed, but which yet thrilled the
listeners as the words and airs were given by the full flexible young
voice.
It looked as if Harry were carrying all before him, and winning each
heart—including that of dreamy, dissatisfied Catherine Hilliard.
Oliver Constable judged so, as he lounged and contorted himself
unnoticed in the background, and said it was the way of the world and
that young beggar’s luck, of which he was not worthy, which he could
not be expected to prize at its proper value.
Two people knew better. Catherine Hilliard could not be called one of
the two, for she never took the question into consideration. It would
have felt too preposterous to her to enquire beforehand, what her
feelings might or might not become, for any hero of flesh and blood.
Besides, Harry Stanhope was not a man to her, only a boy, a big, merry
boy, who formed a momentary study for the thoughtful woman.
Mrs. Hilliard, while she was perfectly conscious of the latent
antagonism between Catherine and Harry Stanhope, still threw
them somewhat ostentatiously together, making Catherine play the
accompaniments to his songs, and causing him—which was a little of a
trial to Harry’s good temper, to be always on the side of Catherine—an
incorrigible bungler, almost as bad as Oliver himself—in the lawn
games in which Harry Stanhope and Fan Constable were adepts, a pleasure
for game lovers to look upon. Mrs. Hilliard elected Harry to take
down Catherine to the improvised suppers which were apt to follow
the improvised parties at the Meadows. Mrs. Hilliard could manage
these manœuvres with so much ease that it robbed them of half their
attractiveness to the manœuvrer, she was wont to complain privately,
since Catherine was as blind as a baby to any premeditation in such
arrangements, and was only more or less bored by the consequences. All
the same, it was her, Louisa Hilliard’s, duty to do what she could as
a hostess in the judicious assortment of her guests, and to show her
cousinly regard by doing what she could also to prevent Catherine’s
missing, by anything save her own folly, the chance of what would never
be a great and yet might prove a suitable establishment, in days when
girls, far more attractive to the generality of men than Catherine was,
could not pick and choose in making a match.
If the hostess baffled and plagued any rival pretender—say Fan
Constable—to a lion’s share of Harry Stanhope’s universal attentions,
so much the better for Mrs. Hilliard’s entertainment, and if it were so
much the worse for the rival pretender, whose fault was it save her own?
Harry Stanhope was not so egregiously foolish in his vanity as to fail
to penetrate the fashion in which Catherine Hilliard was taking stock
of him, weighing him in the balance, and finding him hugely wanting.
‘Look here, Horry,’ he protested, thrusting his fingers through
his fair hair in comical discomfiture, after an hour’s compulsory
companionship with Catherine, ‘that girl has been looking at me through
a microscope, and picking holes in my credit all the evening; she knows
not only how I was ploughed in my smalls, but all about that time I was
rusticated for the beastly row at Walsh’s, though I never told her a
word of the mess. I say, I wish the old woman’ (an irreverent reference
to Mrs. Hilliard, to which the lady would not have objected in the
least) ‘would not persist in pairing us off together. It is no go;
though no doubt Miss Hilliard’s tin might be of use in the farm, she
would not have a gift of me, and unfortunately I could not get the tin
without offering my precious self in exchange.’
‘Ain’t she more the style we’ve been accustomed to—I mean among our
people—than Miss Constable, for instance?’ enquired Horry, doubtfully,
of his oracle. ‘I think Miss Hilliard is rather a fine girl; looks like
a lady without making a fuss about it.’
‘True, oh king! She is stately in her stiffness as a stage duchess. And
she is a sap as well as a swell. I bet you she reads as hard as old
Herculaneum, not that she ever alluded to a book to me, except to one
of Lever’s stories, which she just mentioned tentatively, with great
scrutinising eyes fixed upon me, the better to assure herself that it
was something in my line. But I have glimpses of the old beggars the
English poets, and so forth, if not of the Greek and Latin humbugs,
in the turn of her neck and the wave of her hair; I am in constant
horror lest she should so far forget herself as put me through my exams
again—which line in “Paradise Lost” I prefer, or whether I agree with
Bacon that gunpowder ought to have been invented before lucifers. I
don’t think I can stand it much longer if Mrs. Hilliard will go on
acting as if we were made for each other, though I am prepared to own
that Miss Hilliard is innocent of any pretence in the matter. How could
it be otherwise when she is so stunningly wise and learned, and the
rest of it? Oh! I say, when you see all that, and the knowledge don’t
crush you, suppose you go in for the lady and the tin, to be ploughed
and harrowed into the dirty acres of Copley Grange Farm, and so relieve
your brother-officer of the obligation, Horatio?’
Horry laughed the discordant laugh of the deaf, and mumbled a
disclaimer of the honour and the implied preference on the part of
Catherine, while Harry went on speaking out his thoughts to his
second self with yet greater zest. ‘Now, Miss Constable believes in
me—fact, I assure you. That plucky, go-ahead little woman is, not to
say swindled, by me, for to do myself the justice, I never sought to
take her in; but she gives me credit liberally for a thousand manly
virtues I don’t possess. She half tempts me to believe in them myself,’
protested Harry, with an excited laugh. ‘It is not like you, old
fellow, who have rowed in the same boat with me ever since we two came
into this blessed world, and have naturally grown rather blind to my
weaknesses and besotted about me altogether. She who never saw me till
this season, with all her cleverness, and she is uncommonly clever,
which is better by a long chalk than being bookish—not that she is not
an educated woman also—does more than take me on trust. She endows me
with all the energy and endurance which are hers, not mine. She speaks
as if I were going, single-handed, to bring in the waste places of the
earth, and found a family. Confound it, Horry, it’s rather nice, and
generally improving to be believed in like that by a handsome, good
woman, as true as steel, I’ll wager my head, and as proud as Lucifer
in her own way, while she is ’cute enough in anything else to see
through a millstone,’ finished Harry, complacently stroking his beard,
as if he were beginning to suspect that he was really a finer fellow
than he himself, or any other person, save the faithful follower by his
side, had given him credit for.