A REFORMER’S REWARD.
Oliver suited the action to the word, flung off his coat, bared his
long sinewy arms to the shoulders, advanced to the vacant board, and
laid hold of the dough fast becoming flat and unprofitable. In spite
of his passion he felt shy and awkward under the consciousness of
the adverse, critical eyes glancing at him, some of them in sheer
amazement, some of them in jealous resentment, some of them in sly
amusement, and only a very few of them in dubious generous approbation.
He distrusted his qualifications with reason. But when was he not
awkward? and it was surely possible for a man of his muscle and
modicum of experience to knead dough into a passable condition and
dispose of it in an oven.
As Oliver solemnly pounded at his lump of dough, he was assailed
mentally by successive trains of thought, contradictory, sympathetic,
purely humorous.
In the first place he was angrily sensible of the same momentary rush
of shamefacedness, in trying to bake before his bakers, that he had
felt in first standing in his shop-door before his fellow-townsmen—yet
what was there in this fine, white flour, powdering him and his
companions alike, to stain a man with so disgraceful a stain that in
the case of poor Neaves, the very reflection of it caused the weak
undergraduate to leap into the Isis in order to wash out the blot and
his miserable life with it? Was the mark so much more invidious than
the soil which Neaves’s quondam companions had been fain enough to
contract from the earth of hunting fields, or the soil of stables and
kennels, or the mire of race-courses, or even the smoke and blood of
a battle-field—to pass through which without ‘falling into a funk,’
if the chance came his way, without any deed of his, constituted every
young man a hero?
Why should the mere inference of having to do with wheat as it was made
into bread to feed the multitudes, operate more violently upon men’s
stupid, snobbish prejudices than the report of being mixed up with
barley in the course of becoming malt, or with hops as they passed into
ale—to form refreshment for the thirsty, no doubt? But the refreshment
was decidedly open to abuse when the great distillers and brewers might
also be the great licensed victuallers, the invisible, irresponsible
landlords of scores and hundreds of gin-palaces and ale-houses, as well
as the builders of churches and founders of schools.
Oliver had a fleeting vision of Mrs. Hilliard’s cool, fresh
drawing-room in contrast to the hot vapour-laden bakehouse, with
Catherine Hilliard bidding men fight or die, or speak and witness for
the truth—but never mix flour, yeast and salt, and convert leaven into
wholesome bread, to fill the mouths and recruit the strength of hungry,
fainting creatures.
Oliver saw Harry Stanhope standing without his coat, bareheaded, on
his half-laden cart, ‘forking’ his sheaves of corn, and knew that was
one thing in the estimation of the world and kneading dough was quite
another. There was as great a difference between them as that between
a bar of iron and a twopenny nail. Yet Oliver remembered the American
philosopher Thoreau, and his delight in the sign of self-sufficing
independence which he recognised in the act of baking his own bread.
What a manly, ay, a kingly work Thoreau had made of it, as historians
and poets had dealt with the picturesque initiatory steps taken by
Cincinnatus when the patriot returned from saving his country in the
ranks of war, to plough, and reap, and gather in the fruits of his own
peaceful fields.
Thoreau baked for his own hand, at his own will and pleasure. He was
a republican of republicans—to whom not only courts and thrones were
repugnant, but who, while he had no quarrel with his kind, sought to
know the feelings of a wild man—alone with the marvellous hordes of
lower animals whom he understood and loved, and who repaid him with
their trust—alone with Nature as she came from the hands of her Maker.
Thus Thoreau had steeped his rough bread-making in reflections which
had lent it a hue at once primitive and solemn.
There was another man dubbed a baker, whether he would or not,
nicknamed in wanton mockery because he could not furnish bread for his
famished people; a shy, shrinking man, not altogether without the
dignity of the line of a hundred kings—of St. Louis himself, blended
with the native dignity of innocent intentions in the midst of his
weakness, and with the pathos of a martyr for the sins of his fathers
and evil advisers, as he stood forward in the window of his palace,
wearing the red cap of anarchy for the crown of sovereignty, while
France heard him hailed, not as the monarch—not as ‘Louis le Desiré,’
but as ‘Louis Capet, the Baker.’
There was still another figure engaged in the homely occupation that
rose up then in the Friarton bakehouse. He had been introduced to
Oliver and to thousands more in the president’s speech at the close
of one of the Royal Society’s meetings. Oliver was not intimately
acquainted with the man, as the hero when he had passed from this world
was happily to be rendered familiar to the whole reading public. But
the miller and baker of Friarton—a distinct specimen of his kind—had
got from the president’s speech a general idea of that other master
baker, and rejoiced and gloried in him.
Oliver did not himself possess genius, yet he had some of its wide
sympathies, keen intuitions and susceptibilities, and strong beliefs.
Had the less gifted man known the greater Oliver would have prized
highly the manly self-respect and modesty, even the odd gruff bearing,
which was only the prickly husk to the sweet kernel with its milk of
human kindness and juice of a fine, genial humour, which no general
misconception, no bitter adversity, could sour. Oliver would have
gone a pilgrimage—for he, too, had his boundless enthusiasm—to that
obscure little northern bakehouse, where an intellectual and moral
giant toiled single-handed and fared frugally amidst his inspired
drawings of cherubim and seraphim, ape and Greek boy. Oliver Constable
could not have pretended to match his brother-tradesman’s profound,
patient studies in natural science, or the royal bounty which disposed
of the geological and botanical specimens—so painfully, and yet with
such deep satisfaction and noble exultation, chiselled from the rock
and plucked from the moor. After they had been laboriously and lovingly
assorted and preserved, these specimens, together with the deductions
carefully and warily drawn from them, were lavished with princely
liberality on men of science, for whom they might win name and fame,
while the real conqueror of the spoils was content to remain ‘Dick the
Baker,’ drudging at a trade which was unremunerative to him, unknown
and unhonoured, so far as the mere tinsel of worldly distinction and
applause was concerned. And through it all Dick, who was the reverse
of a morbid, fantastic misanthropist, would have preferred a certain
amount of material prosperity to the slow poverty which ground him to
death at last, with the honest human fear of debt and starvation. He
would have liked in his early manhood to have met with such a degree
of comprehension and fellow-feeling from his neighbours as might have
saved him from being quickly driven back on his natural reserve,
with his huge stores of kindliness, cheeriness, and wit, confined to
the kindred at a distance from him, his one or two rarely endowed,
occasional cronies, his simple old housekeeper, the young students
who were welcome to his priceless instructions without a thought of a
professor’s fee. But in the man’s lofty soul and poetic idealisation,
which could exist along with exact knowledge, he was content, with
something like scorn of being pointed out for any other distinction,
to be known only—apart from a queer fish, and a half-cracked dour
sinner—for what he still was, without prejudice or false shame, ‘Dick
the Baker.’
There would have been a greater charm in the man for Oliver than what
belonged to the simplicity and gladness which took every circumstance
of his lot bravely and thankfully, singing over his baking trough,
singing back to the roar of the waves of the Northern sea. His
heartily admiring biographer has recorded Dick’s honest practice as
a tradesman:—‘His quarter loaf always contained four pounds full,
while the two-pound loaves of many of the other bakers were short by
about four ounces. Cheating had the advantage over honesty of six per
cent. on every loaf—a profit in itself, few weighing their bread and
deducting the deficiency.’
At last Oliver’s mind rambled off to a comical recollection of his
grandfather, the first Oliver Constable, miller and baker, of whom
his grandson had very authentic information, in addition to a faint
personal recollection. This Oliver had been enterprising and ambitious
as any founder of a race. He had gone from a country bakehouse to
London, and served for a term there, in order to be taught what might
be the metropolitan mysteries and perfections of the trade. He had
certainly attained the power of concocting a certain pudding, which was
long held in high estimation in Friarton. The old Oliver, his wife,
children, and kindred a little farther removed, had piqued themselves
on this acquirement, and in order to keep it a private inheritance, had
shrouded it in a captivating secresy. Even in family conclave, when
there was an annual friendly gathering and festival in the baker’s
house each Christmas, and when the supper was crowned with this very
London pudding, as a fitting compliment from the host to his guests,
the rites of the piece of cookery were conducted not only with peculiar
ceremony, but with closed doors. In the course of the evening, the
hostess, having retired and seen that a collection of the necessary
materials—eggs, butter, milk, flour, fruit, and spices, was complete,
and without flaw, ranged in her own back kitchen, returned to the
company, and asked her husband with brief significance, ‘Goodman, are
you ready?’
The head of the house—a man of solid gravity both of body and
mind—then withdrew with quiet importance from the circle of his
friends for the space of half-an-hour. The prevailing standard of
manners exacted that nobody should remark on the retirement of the
entertainer for the good of the entertained, though it was fully
comprehended that he had thrown off his company coat, donned his
professional apron, and was then whisking eggs and beating butter in
solitude, as the highest proof of his hospitality. The result figured
at the banquet, and then all tongues were loosed in praise of the dish
and its maker.
Why not? Perhaps old Oliver Constable’s exercise of his professional
skill in the middle of his season of recreation, was a greater
sacrifice to friendship, and not more of an act of vanity, than is the
preparation of a salad or a sauce by the amateur hands of a modern host
or hostess.
As Oliver shook off the flour, and put on his coat again, Webster
lounged into the bakehouse, and stopped short, bewildered, staring hard
at the empty board and the baker who had just quitted it.
‘Webster, it is not in the fitting order of things that I should be
under the necessity of doing your work,’ said Oliver, whose temper had
got time to cool; ‘I have warned you before, and you have paid no heed.
The connection between us had better come to an end. I give you your
leave.’
‘As you please, sir; from this moment if you like,’ said Webster
jauntily.
‘Very well. I take you at your word,’ said his master.
Oliver was inclined to make an example—if it can be called an example
among servants, whose turn has come to carry matters with a high hand,
and dictate terms to their masters. Let us hope that the new masters
will be magnanimous, and not abuse their power, to a still greater
extent than was done by the old, else the present dead-lock would never
have arisen.
But Oliver was not aware—whether or not the knowledge might have
swayed him—of the combination of circumstances which rendered
Webster’s dismissal a severe blow to the man, in spite of his bravado,
at a crisis in his affairs. The restless, factious baker had been
keeping company with a girl slightly above him in station, whose
relations, especially her father—a thriving master-builder, of
punctilious and conservative views—did not by any means admire in
his prospective son-in-law the hectoring tone, and the free and easy
ways, which, along with considerable force of will and cleverness at
his trade, as at other things, had secured for Webster an ascendency
among the other journeymen bakers, who were characterised for the most
part by greater pliability and less ability. The principal score in
Webster’s favour was his remaining in Mr. Constable’s service. It was
this which kept Webster from being rejected with unhesitating severity
by Keys the builder, and as an inevitable consequence of the summary
dismissal, with tender regret, by pretty, gentle, Nelly Keys. For
though Nelly had been greatly taken with her lover’s lordly swagger,
she was too good a girl, and too dutiful a daughter, to act in direct
disobedience to her father.
When Webster got his leave from Oliver, he knew it was all up with him
and Nelly, to whom he was attached with the peculiar vehemence and
self-assertion of his nature, though he put the best face on what he
regarded as a misfortune, if not a wrong, and braved it out at the
first brush in the bakehouse.
And sure enough, Keys told Webster on the afternoon of the same day
to keep the outside of the master-builder’s door for the rest of the
journeyman baker’s stay at Friarton. The said master-builder had seized
the opportunity of the first rumour of Webster’s quarrel with Mr.
Constable to rescue his daughter from a future husband who had shown
himself a breeder of mischief and instigator to rebellion, and was
likely to end a noisy idle demagogue, a rolling stone that would gather
no moss.
After trying in vain to soften the father, and next to obtain a private
interview with the weeping Nelly, in order to drag from her a promise
to stand by her lover, against her father and the whole world, Webster
took refuge in a Friarton gin-palace, and continued there so long as
to do still more deadly injury to his cause. He was seen towards
nightfall, in Friarton streets, drunk and disorderly, a long step for a
tradesman who has hitherto been decorous in his cups, and who has not
‘gone on the spree’ like any shameless reprobate.
Another day intervened, during which Webster went here and there,
unable, in spite of his boasted powers, to secure a second engagement
in Friarton or its neighbourhood. Instead of getting rid of the fumes
of rage and drink, he contracted still denser fumes of a similar
description. As ill luck would have it, on the evening of the second
day, when the man, always headstrong and violent, and now half-beside
himself with disappointment, mortification, and Dutch courage, was on
his way to the village at which Jim Hull’s nephew still kept together
his country connection, Webster’s path took him past Friarton Mill, and
at some hundred yards’ distance from the house, he encountered his
late master, taking a stroll in the autumn dusk, with his hands in his
pockets and his pipe in his mouth.
Oliver was about to pass by his discarded baker with a brief ‘Good
evening,’ when Webster brushed up against him, and delivered himself of
a sneering, stammering proposal: ‘Let us have a little of your company,
Mister Constable—take a walk together—not out of the way when you
don’t object to fill my place in the bakehouse.’
Oliver saw the state the man was in, and sought to be quit of him
without an unpleasant scene. ‘No; the arrangement would be rather
different,’ he said coolly; ‘but I have no mind to discuss it. Get out
of my road, man, or it will be the worse for you.’
The last sentence was provoked by Webster’s stumbling right across
Oliver’s path, and standing unsteadily barring his farther progress.
‘So, Mister Constable, it was enough to meddle with my baking, and
bully, and make short work of me, though you have not a word to say to
me for the wrong done me—not a word as from man to man, when we meet
like equals. Anyhow, the meeting-place is on a road as is free to both
of us, and under the dark night which is going to come down, and cover
both of us—and what one of us may choose to do to settle the question
between us,’ said Webster incoherently and grandiloquently.
‘What should I have to say to you?’ demanded Oliver. ‘You broke faith
as a servant, you were not in the bakehouse when it was your duty to me
and the other men that you should be there. I simply did my duty as a
master in turning you adrift, not without repeated notice beforehand of
what must happen.’
Webster was not open to reason. He was brutal with unrestrained passion
and distraught with strong drink. He shouted the lie direct to Oliver,
following the accusation of falsehood with a fierce curse and a furious
blow.
Such things happen still, occasionally, in England, in spite of
civilisation, propriety, and the rural police.
Oliver could have best parried the blow by a counter-blow, which,
directed by a strong, steady, not untrained hand, would have laid the
reeling assailant at the assailed man’s feet. But he had an objection
to this aggressive mode of self-defence in which he was certain to come
off conqueror, and in trying merely to parry the violent lunge made at
him, Oliver entangled his long legs with those of his enemy, swerved,
swayed, and fell, somewhat ignominiously, to the ground.
Webster, notwithstanding his half-furious, half-dazed malice, was still
so much the creature of order, and of a peaceful if bragging past, as
to take no advantage of Oliver’s lying prone at the man’s feet and at
his mercy for one decisive minute—the next, Webster uttered a crow of
triumph, administered a not unnatural, but most unchivalrous kick to
the shins of the antagonist struggling on his feet again, and meandered
away in the gathering darkness.
Oliver stood wincing with pain, pulling himself together, and
not believing his senses till he was forced to laugh at his own
incredulity. He might have given chase to the fellow in the heat of the
fray, since Oliver imagined any damage which he had received would have
yielded, for the moment, to the fighting cock in him, while it ought
to have been about matched by the enemy which Webster had put into his
mouth, to steal away his brains and the right use of his legs.
Oliver could, with still greater ease, have called aloud, and reckoned
with security on his call being heard as far as Ned Green’s and the
other millers’ cottages, bringing him instant assistance, which Oliver
did not believe would have been withheld because of the disaffection
common both to the mill and the bakehouse. Webster’s outrage had
been too gross and included the chance of turning the tables, and
effectually scaring many of the conspirators.
As it was, Oliver did neither. He laughed again, a little
constrainedly, for that kick on his shins, though he had been
accustomed to be mauled at football, and though this was almost a
playful kick administered in the delirious inconstancy of Webster’s
mind, had done its work with considerable effect.
After his short laugh Oliver began to reflect. ‘I must have hurt the
rascal on some tender spot to reduce him to such excess of drink and
madness in a couple of days. I gave credit to his pretensions and to
Jim Hull’s dogmatic assurance that Webster would find another master
sooner than I should another servant. Well, there’s nothing to be done
at this time of the day. It is utterly impossible now for him to make
submission and agree to my terms, or for me to reinstate him in the
bakehouse, but we may be no more than quits, although he should have
contrived to crack my ankle-bone. How shall I manage to hop home,
though Fan accuses me of a propensity to stand on one leg? And what am
I to say to Fan and the world at large? A fall? It was a fall, but a
jolly rum fall to produce such consequences.’
Yet Oliver had no further account to give of the accident, whether it
were pride or magnanimity, or a mixture of both, which kept him silent.
He would not condescend to a more particular explanation, though it was
discovered in time that some of the smaller bones of his ankle had been
fractured, and that because the injury had not been properly attended
to at first—on account of his having choked down his suffering, and
slurred over the amount of damage he had received—there followed a
protracted and painful imprisonment to the mill-house. And Oliver came
out of it, and the accompanying illness, even though he had allowed a
pair of learned physicians to be summoned to his aid, limping slightly
for life on one ankle—if not on one knee like Horatius Coccles, as the
culminating touch to his awkwardness.
The accident and its result, when the latter came to be fully known,
excited some stir and talk in Friarton. Of course no ordinary fall
on a level country road as smooth as a bowling-green, to a man in
full possession of his wits and limbs, could have occasioned such a
disaster. The marvel was, how Oliver Constable had fallen at all on
the familiar and sure ground even in the uncertain light of gathering
night, people commented with raised eyebrows. But doubtless it was
his best policy to vouchsafe no details of this unaccountable fall.
There could be hardly any question that it had occurred in some
discreditable scuffle or brawl with low companions. The speakers
recalled the moonlight frolics of the young tradesmen, the time out
of mind removal of lamps from honoured doors, the letting loose of a
pig or two from their styes, with the wild attempt at inaugurating a
boar-hunt in the streets of Friarton. Oliver Constable had been known
to be present at these disgraceful performances, though he might have
been charitably supposed beyond taking an active part in the idiotic
riotous amusements. But innate low tastes, possibly a secret, wretched,
craving for what was generally the stimulant to such uproarious
behaviour, had certainly prevailed over the superficial refinement
wrought by education.
Oliver Constable was likely to prove a dangerous tempter and corrupter
in place of a fine model for his class to follow, and a bracing
encouragement by way of example to the young men of the lower middle
rank. He was a proper fellow to mask his self-indulgence and license
under the guise of philanthropy and unworldliness, to pose as a
reformer! Here was a crying instance of a wolf in sheep’s clothing!
Mrs. Hilliard repeated the essence of the scandal to her cousin
Catherine over their afternoon tea. Oliver Constable was coming out in
the colours which might, perhaps, have been detected from the first,
through the daubing done over them, by a man of the world. The accident
which had fixed a permanent shamble on his gait, was said to have
happened in a shocking drunken row.
It was symptomatic that there had been some time ago a split among the
chapel people, with which Oliver Constable was mixed up. In general
these splits were tokens of a disease peculiar to dissenting bodies, in
which nobody outside dreamt of taking any interest. For that matter,
nobody was likely to hear of the divisions unless from servants and
tradespeople. But for Oliver Constable, who ought to have been the
chief pillar of the chapel, to be in bad odour with the members was too
ominous to be passed over. Here was the end of foolish aspirations,
of eccentricity, and not doing at Rome as the Romans did, but aiming
at being hero or saint or a mixture of both. So Apollo and Caliban by
turns had merged into Vulcan, who had been stealing very vulgar and
unhallowed fire indeed when he met his fit punishment. Mrs. Hilliard
was sorry for Fan—yes, she could spare sincere pity for Fan Constable
at last.
Mrs. Hilliard told her tale with a curious mixture of regret
and annoyance—since she had chosen to count kindred with the
Constables—and of lurking satisfaction, because what she had said
of Oliver’s high faluting, what she had prophesied as sure to follow
transcendental ambition, had been borne out. She had called Oliver half
Apollo half Caliban, she herself was half a good-natured woman, half a
mocking-cynic.
Mrs. Hilliard was stopped by Catherine. The cold statue became
strangely warm, and instinct with life and emotion—red hot, actually
gasping for breath in her indignation. ‘I wonder at you, Louisa,’
panted Catherine, ‘to listen to such wicked slander, to give
credence to it for a moment, to put yourself on an equality with its
fabricators, helping in its circulation. Oliver Constable is a good
man, true as steel, pure as honesty itself, kind as a brother, though
he may waste his fine qualities. I will pledge myself for his perfect
innocence of anything so despicable and loathsome as hypocrisy—even if
he were weak enough to be vicious and not as he is, too strong in his
virtue to care for appearances.’
‘He does not lack an enthusiastic champion,’ observed Mrs. Hilliard,
letting the corners of her mouth droop. ‘Take care, my dear, you
are not infallible in your convictions any more than the gentleman
is in his conduct. The passion for being _outré_ seems infectious.
Ah! blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be
disappointed. I have not been so wise as to be without expectation,
though I have had my misgivings. Now I must confess, in spite of your
looking daggers at me, I am disappointed in Oliver Constable. The
sequel threatens to exceed so tremendously what I bargained for. I
only anticipated a ludicrous collapse; I did not go in for a dismal
wreck—at which I shall not be able to laugh, therefore you need not
be angry with me,’ complained Mrs. Hilliard with a half-comical air of
injury.
But Catherine was angry, in season and out of season, with the wrong
as well as the right person. For how did this staunch champion treat
Oliver the next time she met him, limping slowly down Friarton High
Street? She passed him quickly with the slightest and coldest bow that
any of his defamers had yet administered to him. Mrs. Hilliard could no
more have bowed in that fashion than she could have taken up a stone
and thrown it at the culprit. It was the next thing to a cut direct,
and it did cut Oliver to the heart, with the lively impression that
Catherine Hilliard had listened to and believed the worst of the idle,
senseless, shameful lies told of him.
As for Catherine, she was saying to herself in a fever of perverse,
reproachful wrath and mortification. ‘What right had he who was so
manly, courageous and steadfast to cast his pearls before swine till
they turned and rent him: to spend himself in a manner and for a cause
unworthy of the gift: to act so recklessly that he could be thus
monstrously misjudged and maligned?’
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
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Transcriber Notes
The following are corrections to the original text.
p12 “to” added to (to her, he had).
p45 “unkown” changed to (an unknown specimen).
p52 period added to (something in my line.)
p53 “luciters” changed to (invented before lucifers.)
p62 “quarterspast” changed to (till three quarters past).
p73 “hinfluenzas” changed to (with her colds and influenzas).
p107 closing quote added to (whatever is necessary.’)
p138 comma added to (who was no reformer,)
p148 “taat” changed to (Agne—that her).
p168 “tat” changed to (this instance—that).
p171 “Freemantle” changed to (Mr. Fremantle was content).
p182 closing quote removed from (cousin. That would try).
p213 “suceeed” changed to (succeed in bringing him).
p248 closing quote added to (will be a Nonconformist.’)
p263 period added to (to his individual light.)