OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED
OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND CO.
There was one man of Friarton descent whose distinguished fortunes
occurred not once only to Fan Constable’s mind as presenting a marked
contrast to her brother’s perverse crotchet of self-destruction, where
his social position and even his material prosperity were concerned.
For any tyro might crave leave to doubt whether Oliver Constable would
increase or even retain the amount of fortune which his father had
bequeathed to him by becoming a tradesman in his own person. As for
Fan, she had been fully persuaded from the first that Oliver would
ruin himself commercially—no less than socially. Oliver denied the
necessity stoutly, and when it was thrust upon him, quoted, as Fan
considered, irrelevantly, if not irreverently, the Divine assertion
that a man’s life does not consist of the things which at the best he
only seems to possess.
Hartley, of the now renowned firm of Hartley, Norris, & Co., had stuck
to trade down to the present generation. But then trade had made of the
representative Hartley not simply a man, but a gentleman so far beyond
challenge that he had not merely been spared from the counting-house
and warehouses to Oxford, he had been permitted to become a sleeping
partner, enjoying the funds without undergoing any of the toils of the
huge, opulent concern which his immediate predecessors had founded,
pushed, and fostered by unremitting exertions, giving themselves heart
and soul to the business.
John Hartley, in his character of pure gainer by the struggles and
victories of his father and partners in their branch of trade, had
developed very much into a cultivated _dilettante_. The chief sign he
gave of having inherited any of the individual vigour and ambition of
his stock, was in the zeal and determination with which he avoided the
slightest association—save by name and the receipt of the lion’s share
of the profits—with the business. Yet, according to Oliver Constable’s
principles, John Hartley stood morally responsible for it in its every
detail, down to its pettiest customer and its meanest workman, while
his responsibility was not confined to his own business and his conduct
in its discharge, but extended to his influence over the whole trading
class, to which, in spite of every protest, he distinctly belonged.
Oliver said he would not judge John Hartley. No doubt the man had an
æsthetic bent, and he was squeamish where one kind of vulgarity was
concerned. These idiosyncrasies led him almost perforce to dedicate
himself to the refining of his tastes and the beautifying of his estate
and house—well-nigh to the same extent as the squire of Copley Grange
dedicated himself to a like evangel. And naturally the sleeping partner
and the squire took to each other’s society, silently agreeing to sink
into oblivion the gulf between the gentle fore-fathers of the one and
the rude progenitors of the other.
John Hartley hit on an earl’s daughter with an equally accommodating
memory to consent to be his wife, and never afterwards to allude,
except by a calm, smiling, cleverly timed jest, which disarmed
criticism and took the censorious world by storm, to the source of the
excess of luxuries with which her husband was able to surround her.
It was no business of Oliver Constable’s, whatever he might think; he
was not called upon to proclaim John Hartley a cowardly shirker and
slurrer over of his obligations, an absentee from his post of duty,
a deserter of his class. Certainly Hartley was not singular in his
interpretation of the rights and privileges of the inheritor of a
great firm and its wealth. He went with the multitude in his use or
abuse of the choice of occupations and interests which he commanded.
Even an earnest, enthusiastic commentator on the ‘grand old name of
gentleman,’ who has proved to the gaping world’s edification that
it may be borne by a tradesman of the most unsavoury sort, has been
forced by the clamorous exigencies of public opinion to allow her hero
a problematical title to gentle birth and to wed him to the noble
daughter of a sorry gentleman; above all—strange incongruity to
promote the pseudo-tradesman to the rank of a squire, and the society
of the country squirearchy, before he dies.
But Oliver was roused from his equanimity when he shared the sensation
felt by all Friarton at the news that John Hartley had come down with
Lady Cicely and their household to be even nearer neighbours to the
Constables than the Stanhopes were, by occupying Copley Grange, lent
to them by the squire, while the sleeping partner showed himself wide
awake in contesting the representation of the county, just left vacant
by the death of the late member.
Hartleys to right of him, Stanhopes to left of him, how could Oliver
resist the admission, for the moment at least, that he was with them
and not with the Dadd and Polley set, to which he had sent in his
adherence? For John Hartley made his first canvassing call on his next
neighbour the miller and baker, and though he did not conceal that he
was at Friarton Mill to solicit political support, he acknowledged
there, as he was prepared to announce on the hustings, that he was a
tradesman, and frankly claimed the vote of a brother-tradesman, who
understood John Hartley’s circumstances and the advantage of returning
him to Parliament.
John Hartley was a quiet agreeable man, handsome, with a slightly
affected assumption of Bohemian fashions in his ferocious beard,
semi-artistic slouched sombrero, and colossal meerschaum. In reality he
had not the slightest taint of the Bohemian about him, being pacific,
prudent, and somewhat obstinate. He had only adopted the gentlemanlike
Bohemian as being the reverse of the gentlemanlike tradesman.
Lady Cicely called on Miss Constable. Lady Cicely was not childish or
girlish, like Agneta Stanhope. The sleeping partner’s partner admired
Friarton Mill in a well-bred way, but she never made the smallest
pretence of going mad for rusticity or of playing at being a rustic.
Neither did she mistake Fan for the typical Miller’s daughter. The
visitor took care, notwithstanding, to infer with perfect tact, all
the while, that she was a little struck by finding Miss Constable
a different person from what might have been expected. Not that
Lady Cicely implied Fan was her equal. Lady Cicely was a stout,
commonplace, slightly stolid young woman—the least gratifying, to a
highly-trained eye, of all John Hartley’s surroundings, so that one had
to consider there was that in her origin which indemnified the mind
for the loss—bordering on an offence—to the eye. Still she was not
without dignity in her double chin, and certainly not without mind;
she never lost sight of the fact, or suffered Fan to lose sight of it
for a moment, though it was by no means insisted on with unladylike
self-assertion, it was quietly taken for granted, that an earl’s
daughter and a tradesman’s daughter belonged to opposite poles of
society which no two people in their senses could confuse. But she
administered the same subtle compensation bestowed by Agneta Stanhope,
when the couple of aristocrats agreed in placing Fan quite on a level
with her former Friarton patronesses.
In addition, Lady Cicely civilly and sensibly recognised the points
in common between her husband and Oliver Constable, and connected the
men together by the safe general term ‘business men.’ ‘Mr. Hartley
has never taken an active part in the affairs of his firm, he leaves
everything to his partners,’ she was so good as to explain to Fan; ‘but
of course the interests of trade are his interests, and he will look
after them in the House if he is returned for the county. He and Mr.
Constable ought to have a great deal to say to each other, so that we
depend on your brother’s dining with us next week at the Grange. He
must reserve a day for us when we are quite by ourselves—you will
keep him in mind—won’t you?’ Lady Cicely almost pled with Fan, though
she never dreamt of including the sister, who smiled a little grimly at
the significant omission, in the invitation to the brother.
Lady Cicely was too comfortably resigned and independent on her own
account to care much for public favour, but, like a dutiful wife,
she coveted it, so far as she saw her way to it, for her husband.
She desired to see him in Parliament because so many of her set were
there. She did not trouble herself much about Mr. Hartley’s being in
trade—so many people whom she knew had something to do with trade
now-a-days—still it was advisable that he should be pointed out as
M.P. for his native county, as well as sleeping partner in Hartley,
Norris, & Co.
After all, Fan did not find fault altogether with the Hartleys’
self-interested notice. It was fully understood to be a give-and-take
connection. It had none of that sole prerogative of bestowing
honour—to which Fan had so bitterly objected in former days. To be
sure, the Hartleys were not like the royally frank and free Stanhopes.
Oh, no. Mr. Hartley and Lady Cicely would never raise their social
inferiors by generous adoption into the upper ranks, or even stoop
magnanimously to the lower. Though indeed, had Oliver Constable so
chosen, it was in his power to be, in his degree, the man of university
training and wide travel, the polished man of civilised society, who
had shaken himself loose from all save the money earned by trade, which
John Hartley showed himself with the approbation of everybody, save a
few fanatics.
But Oliver might make use of the Hartleys, as the Hartleys were
plainly disposed to make use of him. Fan was ready in this silent,
mutual compact, to be of benefit to the Hartleys; she returned Lady
Cicely’s call, though Fan was not to dine at Copley Grange—since
it was necessary to draw the line somewhere—and in the course of
the call consented to the hostess’s extracting a considerable amount
of available information about the place and people from the guest.
Fan spoke to her acquaintances down to the Polleys and Dadds of Lady
Cicely’s neighbourliness and willingness to confer her countenance on
Friarton, in return for Friarton’s votes to her husband.
When Lady Cicely easily succeeded, late in the day, in securing the
distinction of being appointed one of the stall-keepers at a bazaar,
and the chief patroness of a conversazione in the neglected museum, in
the course of caterprises undertaken by an indefatigable eleemosynary
committee in the behalf of the local charities, Fan cheerfully worked
and catered for her ladyship’s stall, and for the sale of her packets
of tickets.
It seemed as if Oliver must be on John Hartley’s committee, the list
of whose members soon bore the bold scrawl of Harry Stanhope’s name.
The young fellow chose to write himself, with his most unyeomanlike
fist, ‘Harry Stanhope, yeoman.’ It appeared as if the Oxford-bred
miller must be dragged forward, in his own despite, to take the place
which fortune and education had given him, to ride and drive, and lunch
and speechify, here and there, in the heat of faction, with those to
whom he was really allied, so as to forget the mill and the baker’s
shop with their drudgery, and to forget along with them other shops and
their drudgeries, other shopkeepers with their aims and rewards—high
or low—of which Oliver Constable’s mind had lately been full.
It looked as if Oliver were going to comply with the irresistible
demands made upon him as a man and a citizen. He received John Hartley
with tolerable cordiality. The one man listened to the other’s private
explanations as well as to his public speeches, and, in order to do
both fairly, Oliver not only attended the meetings the candidate was
calling, but accepted his invitations to dine _en famille_ with him and
Lady Cicely. The result, which Oliver could not well avoid, was that a
considerable amount of familiarity was established between him and the
Hartleys. He was hailed as an ally by John Hartley on all occasions;
and it was Oliver’s arm which Lady Cicely took when she left her stall
at the bazaar to go to the refreshment table, and when she walked
the whole length and breadth of the town-hall in order to make her
purchases from her fellow-stall-keepers.
Fan was growing elated at the turn events were taking, and the
precedence thrust on Oliver which he could no longer escape accepting.
And if he accepted it, he must needs lose sight of his hobby and step
involuntarily, as it were, to a vantage ground from which it would
hardly be possible for him to retreat afterwards. Mr. Hartley was
the Liberal member largely upheld by the tradespeople, who not merely
approved of his principles—which, though they had never come to the
front before, were unlike his practice, and belonged to his trade
descent and trade interests—but were proud of him as a tradesman
himself. Still no doubt it was on so gigantic a scale and with such
advantages that the ordinary lineaments of his class were a good deal
effaced, and that it was out of the question for him to fraternise
with the smaller fry. He was also, through his personal antecedents,
habits and predilections, and notably through his marriage with Lady
Cicely, at one with the opposite side—supported by the great bulk of
the professional men who were apt to be more Conservative than the
Conservative county gentry and Conservative nobility to whose skirts
the professional men clung. It was no matter that John Hartley was
fighting in a political battle against Colonel Hastings, the head of
the ancient house of Hastings of Westmote and the nephew of the Marquis
of Saltmarsh.
The strife in its greatest keenness was conducted with the courtesy of
gentlemen. Between their electioneering bouts, the men met not merely
as amicable foes, but as social allies in the houses of their common
acquaintances. John Hartley and Colonel Hastings agreed to differ. They
were more than familiar with each other’s faces. They were members of
the same clubs—if not of the Reform and Carlton—of the Alpine and
Travellers’ Clubs, and Colonel Hastings was married to an old neighbour
and early friend of Lady Cicely Hartley’s.
Therefore it could not be held that Oliver Constable was necessarily
consigning himself to farther fraternity with the lower orders when he
espoused the cause of John Hartley.
But had he espoused the cause? All at once, with the thrill of a
shock—not only to Fan and the Hartleys, but to the whole Liberal
party—including the defaulter’s fellow-tradesmen, nay, to the very
Conservatives, who gave the newcomer only a half-hearted gibing
welcome, as to an erratic wavering adherent, who was not at all to be
depended upon—Oliver marched over with his single vote to the enemy.
It sounded as if he were a turncoat, it brought down upon Oliver the
indignant accusation and ugly name, though there was nothing on earth
to be gained by it, as Fan protested piteously. Oliver achieved the
climax of inconsistency by figuring as a Conservative. ‘I am not a
Conservative,’ he denied, and then added hastily, ‘but what’s in a
name? I never was and never will be a party man,’ he cried; ‘and I am
going to stand by Hastings because I think he is less of a party man
than Hartley. I don’t say that both are not honest men according to
their lights, but Hastings is either better qualified to judge for
himself, or he is more bent on acting in obedience to his judgment and
conscience. He has pledged himself to do what he can for more than one
or two measures which carry justice and righteousness on their face,
that I would to God Englishmen of all parties were manly and true
enough to unite and carry through, but which are not in the _rôle_ of
Hastings’ party any more than they are on the cards of the Liberals.
Hartley will not bring forward or second one of these bills; on the
contrary, he will throw what weight he possesses in the opposite
scale. He has said as much. He is too cautious, too Conservative at
heart—under his Liberal cloak if you will—too selfish in grasping and
not scattering—not even risking his gains, too bound to a clique to
do anything else. I don’t go in for Hastings in everything, not by a
long chalk; I am not a Conservative, but since there is only the choice
between these two, on the whole I prefer Hastings and his individual
politics, let us say, to Hartley and his general creed.’
Oliver might prefer whom he liked. He was a freeborn subject of her
Majesty, and undoubtedly he was at liberty to make his selection, but
he received little toleration and less sympathy in his withdrawal from
his party. His secession was met with a burst of reprobation. Old Dadd
called him ‘that hair-splitting fool.’ Mrs. Polley argued it was all
very well to have a mind of one’s own, but sheer refractoriness would
not sell loaves. See if Oliver Constable had not managed with his
college learning to anger his customers all round. She went in for her
own opinions, as most of her hearers knew, but for men and women in
business not to be able to keep their minds to themselves on occasions,
and behave as their best friends had a right to expect of them, which
was not to be weathercocks, and fly in the face of their associates and
supporters, was rank conceit and impertinence, little short of madness.
Not even Mr. Holland with the deacons of the chapel could pass by
Oliver’s conduct without remonstrance, seeing that it threatened
serious damage to the brilliant prosperity just dawning on the
congregation.
The chapel had been almost to a man for John Hartley. Not that he
was himself a chapel-man. As might have been supposed, the plain and
pithy, bald and homely Nonconformist worship was extremely repugnant
to him. But he had shown that he retained a reserve of his father’s
and grandfather’s sharpness in seizing an advantage, when he renewed,
in a manner, his alliance with the chapel, in anticipation of his
election. He recalled to his recollection, what he had apparently long
forgotten, that his father had been brought up a dissenter, and had
lived and died a maintainer of dissent in his own person. John Hartley
proved satisfactorily his powers of memory, by all at once bringing
out a hidden store of knowledge of dissenting annals—exceedingly
acceptable to a religious body accustomed to be, not to say slighted,
but ignored, by their brethren of the church. He betrayed a sentimental
inclination to linger over and dally with these old associations,
which served to propitiate the chapel members for his desertion of
their communion. He was not guilty of absolute misstatement when he
suffered it to be inferred that circumstances had been against him.
The difficulties of his position, the entanglements of the circle in
which he moved, especially the natural influence of Lady Cicely, had
drawn him back into the bosom of a church which was at last bestirring
itself, and testifying to the good it had got from the noble protests
of the early Puritans and the later Methodists against its periods of
latitudinarianism.
John Hartley did not pretend that he would return to the ranks of the
nonconformists, and the chapel people of Friarton were too reasonable
to expect it of a man like him. But he treated them with great respect,
almost with pensive tenderness. He called upon Mr. Holland and
mentioned in conversation that his father had sat under the profitable
ministry of an able and pious grand-uncle of the Friarton pastor’s.
John Hartley requested to be taken into the chapel on a week-day,
though it did not seem to occur to him to attend the Wednesday lecture
or the Friday prayer-meeting, and then asked humbly if he might be
permitted to present new, more efficient, and ornamental chandeliers,
to help to shed material light on the congregation—a request which was
handsomely granted.
Lady Cicely called on Mrs. Holland, and begged the shape of her baby’s
pinafore, thus showing that, though Lady Cicely was by every inherited
affinity a churchwoman, she was, nevertheless, so far leavened by her
husband’s purer ecclesiastical origin, as not to suspect contamination
lurking in a dissenting baby’s bib and frills. The result was that the
chapel people—from Mr. Holland to Jack Dadd—were strongly in favour
of John Hartley, to the extent of considering him in part their own
property and candidate. For though he had not promised to procure the
disestablishment of the church, he had engaged to remain neutral on
the Burials Bill, while Colonel Hastings was openly antagonistic to
dissenting prayers prayed by a dissenting clergyman, over a dissenter’s
corpse in a parish churchyard. And the chapel constituents were assured
they would procure yet better terms from their member. They began
to grow rashly secure of his good offices and to plume themselves
beforehand on the distinction that was awaiting them.
Oliver’s fresh secession was therefore not only an affront to his
co-religionists, they were driven to reckon him guilty of uncalled-for
schism and lukewarm treachery, where the interests of the chapel
were concerned. For unluckily, his example affected others—only
a contemptible few, no doubt—malcontents, jealous of the leading
deacons and the larger contributors, such as were to be found in every
congregation, discontented Adullamites, the breath of whose nostrils
was mischief. These were mostly men among the poorer members of no
repute, who had failed in business, who had erred in their religious
profession and moral practice, persons who did little credit to Oliver
Constable as his followers, on whom he probably did not count, as he
did not encourage their adherence. But he made them prominent to the
disgust of the rest of the congregation. He instigated them, whether
he meant it or not, when they would otherwise have wrangled aimlessly,
to show that ‘the connection’ was divided, to make a definite
demonstration, which, however small, was a scandal in the eyes of the
magnates of the chapel, for Colonel Hastings.
There were meetings official and unofficial in the chapel vestry and in
members’ houses, that the congregation might discuss among themselves
the question of Oliver Constable’s delinquency. There were loud and
long whisperings about him as not only disaffected, but as a young
fellow of dangerous license of opinion, who would in all likelihood
end in rationalism and free-thinking. ’Liza Polley regarded him, in
horrified fascination, as a dreadful young genius, who, in his pride
of unsanctified intellect, dared to defy Mr. Holland and Mr. Dadd. Yet
she had never heard such naughty words as Jack Dadd would let fall
sometimes, drop from Oliver’s mouth. He was a regular and reverent
worshipper at the chapel. Nobody had ever seen him ‘screwed’ or so
much as half screwed, though he kept company on occasions with the
young shopkeepers of the town. He was understood to be domestic in
his habits. He was known to consider the poor with even an excess of
liberality, while he sought to do it without observation. ’Liza had
heard him laughed at for the absurd rigidity of his scruples in the
conduct of his business. But she feared it would be all the worse
for Oliver, if he turned out, after all, to be little better than an
atheist, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Surely nobody would think him
‘a great catch’ now. The fact that his suit to her had come to nothing,
was like one of those deliverances—of which one reads in good books.
Oliver was not left in partial ignorance of the ordeal through which he
was passing. Notably the minister, and next to him one qualified member
after another, were appointed to deal with the offender. Oliver found
the minister the least arrogant and intolerant of his inquisitors.
But even Mr. Holland could not see what Oliver thought he saw of the
comparative insignificance of the burial of the dead to the welfare
of the living. Mr. Holland looked as if he too considered Oliver’s
citation of the injunction, ‘let the dead bury their dead,’ misapplied,
as Fan had judged his quotation of other maxims which she did not
propose to treat as of no weight in themselves. Mr. Holland talked of
institutions and organisations, signs and precedents, of the urgent
necessity for unity among brethren, of preserving the peace of the
congregation, of making everything give place to the great interests
of nonconformity in England, of the compulsion laid upon men that they
should work with the tools which Providence had put into their hands.
But here Oliver was as obdurate and slow of comprehension as his pastor
could be on the respective claims of the dead and the living.
‘Right and wrong can never undergo change or modification,’ protested
Oliver hotly. ‘I was a man before I was a Christian. I am a Christian
just because I am convinced Christianity is the one sheet anchor and
lever for humanity. I was and am a Christian before I ever will be a
Nonconformist.’
The result was that Oliver found himself isolated and ostracised,
viewed as a contumacious chapel member, suffered of course to continue
among the loyal members, because there was no formula by which he could
be expelled on such grounds, but no longer trusted and approved of; so
far from it, he was in the meantime an object of reprobation to the
greater number of his brethren.
Perhaps it could not be helped, perhaps he partly deserved his
condemnation. For Oliver was not altogether clear in his judgment and
conscience where nonconformity was concerned. He was by constitution a
many-sided man, prone to eclecticism on most subjects, except, indeed,
on what were to him the eternal verities of right and wrong in life,
and in a divinely ordained religion. He must always be more or less at
variance with men who were never divided in their minds on the merits
of all other questions which, to Oliver Constable, were, to say the
least, open to discussion.
He had read and seen a good deal on both sides of English
ecclesiastical history. He had sympathies with both. His heroes stood
ranked under opposing banners. He gave in his adherence to Jeremy
Taylor and Bishop Butler and Samuel Wilberforce, as well as to Richard
Baxter and John Wesley and Robert Hall.
But Oliver had been brought up a nonconformist. He had gone with his
father to the chapel, while Fan had gone with her mother to the church.
There had been no necessary strife in the family on this account.
Peter Constable, though a man of inferior abilities to his son,
had possessed some mental features in common with Oliver. Peter
had respected his wife’s form of faith as she had respected his.
Occasionally he had joined in her service and she had joined in his,
but in proportion as there was no rancorous war of creeds, there
had been no proselytism. To Oliver the chapel was the church of his
fathers, and of his section of the community. He was perfectly sensible
of the defects of its system, but he was far from prepared to grant
that the merits did not exceed the defects, and still less that the
defects of dissenters were more ruinous than the shortcomings of
churchmen.
Under this impression, Oliver held it disloyal to abandon the chapel,
any more than the class to which he belonged. At the same time he had
his doubts and scruples. But just as he was a man of much stronger
imagination and capacity for idealisation than John Hartley was,
Oliver did not feel offended by the bareness and ruggedness of the
ecclesiastical ways he trod. He saw beyond them, even as he saw beyond
the modern smoothness and smartness of the chapel building, back into
what struck him as the less objectionable gauntness and grimness of
its predecessor in which earnest and fervent men had worshipped,
often to the peril and loss of their earthly joys and worldly goods.
There were records in existence which proved that the chapel had been
among the earliest of its kind in England. When Oliver thought that
contemporaries and allies of John Milton and John Bunyan, Oliver
Cromwell, Blake and Daniel Defoe—who, it seems, has been convicted of
time-serving and double-dealing, but who was so stout and unflinching a
patriot withal, that one may be tempted to prefer Defoe’s shuffling to
some later men’s consistency—Oliver Constable laughed at the idea of
men of narrow and uncultured intellect and vulgar bumptiousness being
the sole figures that peopled the region in which he had come to sit
apart, conscious that he was looked upon as an interloper and false
friend, unworthy of the right hand of fellowship, or of the confidence
of his companions.
John Hartley won the election mainly by the support of the
dissenters—whom, however, success did not at once soften to the
renegade.