Chapter II: Oliver Constable’s Return

FAN CONSTABLE was in the drawing-room of the mill-house, awaiting the return of her brother from his last term at Oxford. A mill-house may have its drawing-room, and its son may have been at Oxford, and that not in the old capacity of a servitor, in the experience of modern England.

Old Peter Constable, who had inherited from his father not only Friarton Mill and its meadows, but the chief baking business in the town of Friarton, had possessed other flour mills also, and had died a well-to-do man. He might have gone a little way off and kept a much more pretentious establishment than that of Friarton Mill, without being guilty of extravagant housekeeping for his means. But he was neither ashamed of his origin nor of his business; he was unassuming in his nature, and he was almost as proud of the old place with an instinctive unquestioning fondness, as his neighbour the Squire adored it on the last principles of taste.

The miller and baker’s only son had distinguished himself as a boy in his classes at Friarton Grammar School—which was rather famous among grammar schools, and, having acquired a good name for sending up lads who took scholarships, and became in due time fellows and tutors of Oxford colleges, was eager to keep up its reputation, and, by the mouths of its masters, egged on promising pupils to go in for the prizes of learning. The case of Oliver Constable formed no exception. It seemed as if he were only fulfilling his part of the obligation, when, after having been head boy at Friarton, he went up to Oxford and immediately vindicated the propriety of the step by gaining a scholarship—though indeed his father was sufficiently well off to make no objection to paying his son’s college terms in full.

Old Peter Constable continued to have no scruple on the point of maintaining his son at Oxford, because at the end of Oliver’s first term there occurred a passage between the father and son which may sound incredible, but which actually had a precedent, that appeared in print in the life of a Scotch earl and his heir. The miller, like the old Earl of Elgin, feeling highly gratified by his boy’s success, thought to reward it by sending him as big a cheque as the elder man felt justified in giving over and above the younger man’s income, bidding him spend that in any manner which might please him best. And the young miller, like the young earl, returned the cheque with a grateful acknowledgment of the kindness of the intention, and an announcement that he had no use for the money; he was amply provided with the sinews of war already; he would rather the sum were spent in procuring some special pleasure for the father, who was frugal and self-denying in his personal habits, or for the sister Fan, who, being a girl—and an only and motherless girl—needed particular indulgence. It remained to be proved whether the young miller would follow up his extraordinary moderation by a career in any respect parallel to that of the patriotic statesman.

But in spite of Peter Constable’s pride and confidence in his son from the beginning, it had not been without a certain ruefulness that the man had consented to the single lad of the Constables’ household forsaking the old path, which in Peter’s eyes was the safest and pleasantest in the world, and which had been trodden smooth—as it were, sprinkled white—for young Oliver by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. The Constables were not of a rank to go beyond a great-grandfather, but there had been at least three generations of them in Friarton Mill and Friarton bakehouse, and mill and bakehouse had flourished under the Constables’ rule, and had been known far and wide for as unadulterated, well-ground flour, and as honestly kneaded bread as could be expected from fallible men. The staff of life, preserved as nearly as possible intact, had proved a boon to the community, while the community in its turn had rewarded its faithful servants by becoming their steady patrons.

Of course the mill and the bakehouse must pass away from the family if Oliver developed into a scholar and gentleman, unless, to be sure, Fan married a miller and baker, which did not seem likely. On the whole, fully sensible as Peter felt that Oliver was a credit and even an honour to his people, the miller would a good deal rather that his son had remained in his own rank of life, and taken over from his failing hands the old mill, which was the next thing to ‘parent, child and wife’ in its owner’s estimation.

Events had not so shaped themselves, while Peter Constable was modest, just, even generous. He would not set up his judgment against the combined opinions of those who ought to know better—the learned masters and parsons of Friarton Grammar School. Old Peter would not let his prepossessions and prejudices stand in the way of Oliver’s rise in life, if Oliver chose to rise; though to Peter’s mind such an ascent was very often neither a comfortable nor a creditable process. He would not constrain the lad to sacrifice an ambition which, with his gifts, might be natural and proper in him, in order to maintain old landmarks.

As for Oliver, he responded plastically to the promptings of his early teachers. He was keen on colleges and college-learning with all the power and delight which those ideas then involved for him. And the child Fan was even more enthusiastic than her brother on the associations and attainments he was entering upon. She set herself with the pertinacity and absence of reasonable calculation of a woman, from the day Oliver left for college, to qualify herself for being, at no distant day, the worthy sister and fit companion of a great don—a dignitary high up in the Church, or an honoured judge.

So Peter tried also to accommodate himself to the will of Providence and the force of circumstances. He was too old, indeed, to begin a course of training in order to figure suitably as the father of one of the magnates whose laurels were so quickly and easily won—in Fan’s imagination. He knew full well, that though his boy as yet was the same to him, and came home in the long vacation, rather to Fan’s disgust, unforgetful of and undisgusted with a single homely detail of the old life, though Oliver was, as he had ever been, perfectly natural and unaffected, and would lend a hand to make up accounts and to help his father with the management of the large business and many servants in every way in the young man’s power, still in the course of time Oliver’s widely different occupations must separate father and son.

Even already, in the midst of the son’s staunchness to first ties, the father recognised with a curious mixture of fatherly pride and sharp twinges of pain, in spite of his fatherly unselfishness, the certain consequences of Oliver’s withdrawal from handicraft or trade and absorption in the pursuit of learning, and in the companionship of the class with regard to which Peter, in spite of his sagacity, fully believed the pursuit of learning was the regular business of the members’ lives, unless when they took a little bodily recreation in the form of cricket, or boating, or sport. Oliver might be as humble and hearty as he liked, but he was growing in the very tone of his voice, and carriage of his head, and movement of his hand, more and more of a gentleman, like the Squire and his friends. The boy could not help himself; it was to his credit that he should, like good wood, take on polish so rapidly. But though he would never turn his back on his father, the men would gradually grow strange and shy as companions to each other. All the more reason, Peter thought bravely and disinterestedly, for him to make matters as smooth and easy to Oliver when he should come after him, his father, as the old miller could contrive. There were certain things which he, Peter, could still do better than his clever, cultivated son, and it was some indemnification to Peter for his own loss to do them for Oliver.

Peter sold advantageously the leases of the mills he had taken on in addition to Friarton, and laid up the purchase-money in the funds, where it would be no trouble, but a decided boon, to a gentleman and scholar, as well as to Fan. Peter was on terms for the sale of the baking business, but he could not find it in his heart to dispose of Friarton Mill, though he knew he should always find a ready buyer in the squire of Copley Grange, who would willingly suffer Peter to stay on as tenant in the place for the rest of his life. But the miller fancied Oliver might care to retain the mill, letting it to a tenant who should reserve quarters for the landlord if ever he liked to revisit the mill-house.

Death stepped in and settled all the arrangements before Peter had come to an end of his plans for his son’s greater ease and well-being. The miller died peacefully with Oliver sharing Fan’s watch by their father’s pillow, raising, for an interval of relief on the broad young breast, the bowed shoulders on which the young man, as a child, had so often ridden triumphantly, and receiving reverently and tenderly the last fluttering sigh.

In those first days of mourning little had been said of Oliver’s future line of life, which had still remained so far undecided at the time of his father’s death. As a matter of course, Oliver had returned to Oxford to finish his term and take his degree, which he did with all the _éclat_ that had been expected from him, winning a first class, and immediately afterwards returning to Friarton Mill—his first return since his father’s death—with Fan awaiting him to do what she could to make up for the absence of another face and voice by lavishing upon her brother her unbounded congratulations.

It was the month of June, one of the two seasons when Friarton Mill was the nearest to an Arcadia. Enough of time had passed for Fan Constable to be comforted for her old father’s death. She was able to hail her brother’s arrival on the heels of his achievement, with all it implied to her, in a spirit of exalted approbation. She was anxious to do him all the honour in her power, and she displayed her anxiety according to her instincts and training.

It was the fashion in Friarton to say that Fan Constable was a worldly-minded as well as an unjustifiably proud and assuming young woman. But Fan expressed herself on this occasion in a sufficiently simple manner. She conned a cookery book, and tormented the miller’s old housekeeper to cook a dinner, which Sally Pope said might have been another funeral or wedding feast; and farther exasperated Sally by bidding her serve it at a late hour. In the meantime Fan repaired with all her belongings to the drawing-room, which had not been her ordinary sitting-room. She had previously dressed herself in her best gown of dim black silk and crape, with its sweeping train, and she now sat down to look out for Oliver with an impatiently throbbing heart.

That drawing-room had been inaugurated by Fan, and yet it did not reflect her character in the slightest degree. It was a singularly colourless, pointless room, and Fan’s was not a colourless or pointless nature. Fan’s taste had been just so far educated as to have reached the chill circle of negation. She was able to reject with aversion the stuffy crowd of incongruous, inconsequent tables and chairs, the tawdry or glaring vulgarity of ornament in the houses of the wealthier tradespeople, and even of the condescending professional people of Friarton, with whom her visiting-list began and ended. Therefore there was none of the embarrassment of more than doubtful riches apt to distinguish third- or fourth-rate drawing-rooms in the room at Friarton Mill. There were no Berlin wool or bead monstrosities, no ‘table books’ overpoweringly gorgeous, like the Queen’s Lifeguards, in scarlet and gold bindings; no terrible specimens of art in water-colours or chalks, no china chimney vases painted coarsely in all the colours of the rainbow, and reckoned very handsome jars by their complacent possessors; no starched tangles of white cotton, crackling at every touch, on the backs of chairs and sofas, or on the faces of little tables, attaching themselves without permission to the collars of coats and the sleeves of gowns. Fan knew better than these attributes of half civilisation went, but her knowledge stopped short there, and only served to reveal her remaining amount of ignorance. And she was so afraid of compromising herself in her ignorance that she restricted herself as severely in her drawing-room as though she had been a social Puritan: she ventured on little or nothing beyond the absolutely necessary rosewood tables and cane seats of the simplest form, the carpet and hangings of the most subdued tint and pattern, the plain cottage piano with its heap of music, not in admired disorder, but in deliberate tidiness in the background,—the attenuated flower-glasses which would only hold the most attenuated bouquets. The one error which Fan had allowed herself to fall into, was still on the side of colourlessness and coldness. There was a large mirror over the plain white marble chimney-piece which reflected and intensified with a stony, topographical correctness the dim, meagre effect of the room.

There could not have been a wider contrast between the interior and the world without, to which the room ought to have had an affinity, between the natural homeliness and affluence of sweet beauty and gaiety in the Friarton Mill surroundings, and the artificial vow of perpetual frigidity and austerity—according to which Fan’s drawing-room was arranged.

‘That drawing-room of Fan Constable’s is another version of the glacial theory,’ Mrs. Hilliard, the most privileged and liveliest woman in Friarton, used to declare, with a shrug of her shoulders and a real shiver. ‘It is the bondage to starvation of rising gentility.’

Fan was perfectly conscious of a deficiency, while she would rather lay herself open to a charge of something lacking in her room, than to the countercharge of false adornment. But she was not sensible that the chief and unpardonable defect was the absence of all trace of human joy or sorrow, all touch of human character and token of individual bent, which might have redeemed the barest room; and that it was the sense of uneasiness and uncertainty, of doubting and halting on the threshold of a new order of existence which rendered the atmosphere of this room repellant as well as cold. Mrs. Hilliard was speaking a certain amount of nonsense when she added that Fan’s room contained the last drawing-room suite advertised by Maple or Shoolbred, weeded to death, since neither Maple—nor Morris himself—could have adequately supplied the fatal weakness of that room.

But Fan’s own presence did something to enrich it. Fan in her sweeping mourning was a small, fine-featured, keen-eyed, dark-haired, restless little woman, whose temperament was the reverse of lymphatic, who had none of the facile, mindless, heartless sweetness that would have added the last mawkish offence to the other offences. How a creature like Fan could exist even for an hour at a time in such a domestic desert, how she could fail to impress on it some token of her ardent identity, only proved the strong self-restraint, the determination of purpose of which the girl was capable.

Fan was idle this afternoon as she was rarely idle, since her energy, like that of Michael the Wizard’s little fiends, demanded a constant field for its operation; and as she was inclined to treat with withering contempt all the poor little girlish fancy-work which had ever come under her notice, she was notable, for her years, in household management, and practical in feminine wisdom. Fan could have kept the house, and regulated and overlooked the _ménage_ very nearly as well as Sally Pope—in fact she did so when Sally would let her—and this is no small testimony to Fan’s talents, for old Sally Pope was an experienced and efficient, if conceited, housekeeper and cook. Not a girl in Friarton, not one of the well-born vicar’s daughters, who had each received an excellent education, seen something of the great world, was clever in her own way, and knew herself compelled to make the most of her allowance for dress and minor expenses, could spend that allowance more judiciously in every respect than Fan Constable—who might have been supposed to revel in rude abundance—could dispose of her private income. Not a girl, hardly a matron in the parish, was so available for choir-practising, school teaching, managing the details of charitable clubs as Fan Constable had already proved herself,—facts which the vicar’s wife, and the mistress of Copley Grange, when she was alive, knew right well.

Fan acted more from general good principles, and, perhaps, in some measure, unconsciously from policy, than from a purely benevolent temper. Yet at the most unexpected seasons, and in circumstances which were not so much out of the common as to warrant an exception to the rule, Fan Constable would suddenly amaze and overcome her coadjutors by a burst of womanly tenderness, deep, wistful and self-accusing, perfectly irresistible in such a woman.

It was by dint of her early strength of will, and of something sterling in her earnestness even when the game did not seem worth the candle, quite as much as on account of her father’s purse and a credulous faith in her brother’s genius—with the future honour which it might reflect on Friarton, that Fan had been lifted over the heads of her compeers and promoted to a somewhat difficult footing, for which it is needless to say that she had to bear much obloquy, in a rank of society considerably above what was the original sphere of the owners of Friarton Mill.

Fan could not work on the eve of what she was firmly persuaded must be one of the great crises of her life. Oliver was coming home crowned with the only laurels he could have gathered; and Fan had the entire sympathy with the gathering which belonged to the consciousness that she too was capable of enterprise and application, though not in securing such triumphs as Oliver had won. Fan knew perfectly that she was not clever in one sense; she was even slow where book-learning was concerned. Of course, she had by perseverance mastered the obstacles which had lain in the way of her becoming a fairly well-educated girl, after her father had been induced to send her to good schools both at home and abroad; and she had striven hard to cultivate her mind and taste still farther, so as to become a tolerable companion for Oliver—one of whom he need not be ashamed when educated men and refined women were his daily associates.

Still the truth remained that Fan was not intellectual—like Catherine Hilliard at the Meadows, or Lucy Houghton, the vicar’s eldest daughter, who might have made some pretence to enact ‘sweet girl-graduates.’ None could be better aware of what she lacked in this respect than Fan, who had even an inordinate value for the attainments in which she failed—who felt only the more called upon, with a half-pathetic meekness and humility in the middle of her pride and high spirit, to support Oliver’s dignity by the sedulous exercise of the faculties Providence had given her. She believed she was ladylike, she knew she was sensible, she felt none could be more deeply attached to Oliver and his interests. She was prepared to prove an excellent mistress of his establishment and manager of his household expenses, so long as he needed her. What was still stronger evidence of her devotion, she was prepared to vacate the post she craved, for the consummation of her wishes, on a suitable marriage on Oliver’s part. Of course Oliver ought to marry and marry well, which would be a help to his social position. Then her services would no longer be required, and—well, she might possibly marry in her turn.

Oliver was coming home to Friarton Mill, but there was little likelihood that he would stay there. He might already have formed his plans—whatever they were Fan was ready to give in her adherence to them. She had no desire to remain at Friarton Mill; she had, on the contrary, a great inclination to get away from all that hampered her and would hamper her brother. She was a woman of strong and faithful family affections, but she was as nearly as possible without local attachments. She had a feeling for beauty—rather in form than in colour, but she was not possessed with the admiration which Friarton Mill frequently called forth. She rather resented its ardent expression to her, as some Scotchmen resent the enthusiasm many foreigners entertain for them in the light of the countrymen of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.

She did not at all approve of the shape the furor took; and she kept herself out of the way of those visitors from Copley Grange, who, in spite of the hints of the Squire, were too stolid in their superior rank to understand that Fan was not the typical miller’s daughter and were fain to patronise her under an altogether erroneous impression.

Such gratuitous patronage would fill Fan with an intensity of indignation and affront so far beyond what the offence deserved, that the wrath became ludicrous in its anti-climax. It was the new order of things, it was the coming dignity, it was Oliver the chief bestower of the dignity, that were all affably patronised in the person of Fan, and Fan had to be angry for the whole.

At last Oliver turned into the court, walking and carrying his bag from the station as usual—‘as if nothing had happened,’ Fan exclaimed to herself, with a quick shade of vexation, while she ran downstairs to welcome him on the threshold.

There was little family likeness between the brother and sister, as there were few points in unison in their characters, beyond what existed in their uprightness and the depth of regard between the two—who, so far as near kindred was concerned, stood alone in the world and were all in all to each other. Certainly Oliver was spare as Fan was slight, and there was a little of a worn look about the young man’s thin face, which testified to the work of nervous energy there also. But he was big and Fan was little. His hair was brown, straight, and already thin. Hers was black, wavy and luxuriant. He had a ruddy tinge in the brown of his complexion which no burning of the midnight oil—and he had burned it in his time with a young man’s superb recklessness—had served to rout. Fan’s complexion was the clear paleness often found in a brunette.

But the greatest contrast in Oliver and Fan Constable’s features was found in the eyes, though in both brother and sister these were brown. Fan’s had the hazel tint and the keen observation combined with the shyness of a pheasant or a partridge’s eye. Oliver’s eyes were darker in hue, and though they were not without repressed fire, had much of the brooding reflectiveness—verging on doggedness—of the ox’s eye.

Oliver Constable was firmly knit, and ought to have carried himself as easily, and with as natural a grace, in his broad-shouldered height, as Fan did in her low stature. But the peculiar neatness and daintiness of personal belongings which constituted not only a crowning distinction but a ruling passion in Fan, so that slovenliness and disorder caused her absolute pain, were wholly absent in her brother’s case. There could not have been the remotest chance, even supposing he had been a short instead of a tall man, of his worst enemies calling Oliver ‘dapper’ or ‘smug,’ as some of Fan’s ‘dear friends’ chose to term her ‘natty’ or ‘trim.’

But although Oliver wore the grey morning suit which has replaced the ‘purple’ in connection with the ‘fine linen’ in the dress of a Dives or a duke, which is at once perfectly unassuming and perfectly good of its kind, the miller’s son and heir suffered from an innate, incurable personal negligence, such as besets some men in all ranks and in all nations—only the defect in an Englishman belonging to one of the upper classes is free from the repulsive element of uncleanliness which is apt to attend on the Bohemian negligence of a foreigner.

Fan was chronically distressed by this flaw of negligence in Oliver’s idiosyncrasy. She had made a searching analysis to discover its origin, in the course of vigorous attempts to overcome the weakness, but she had been no more able to reach its root than she had succeeded in shaking its influence for a day. It was not that Oliver was so ill-made that his coats and trousers would not sit properly on his figure, for he was really a handsome man if he could have done himself justice. It was not that the habits of a gentleman did not come naturally to him, and had not been long practised by him. For that matter their father, who had never aspired to be more than his father had been before him, had shown himself a tidy old martinet in his ways—just as she, Fan, could not bear a pin out of its place, long before she was subjected to school training. Yet here was Oliver, who had enjoyed every advantage since he was a mere lad, who was, as Fan owned willingly, more fastidious than herself in all essentials of manly and womanly good breeding, in non-essentials a picture of helpless, hopeless disorder from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; with the shifting hat or cap on the drifting clouds of brown hair which no close clipping of barber could keep a week in its place; with his crumpled collar, his loosened, twisted necktie, his eccentric cuffs—one of which would disappear up his coat-sleeve, while the other would out-herod fashion by hanging not merely over his knuckles, but nearly to the tips of his fingers. The last offence was in his boots, which, let Oliver buy them from the prince of honest and accomplished boot-makers, in the course of a week or two, took to disreputable curling up at the toes and going down at the heels, with an air of being hard upon the parting of upper leather and sole, and of affording an irresistible attraction to mud and dust, like the sorriest hob-nailed shoes of any day labourer.

All this in a young, handsome, college-bred man would have been unpardonable if there had been any cure for it; but Fan in her despair was profoundly conscious there was none. She might call Oliver to account every hour of the day, as a mother who is a disciplinarian may lecture a careless hoyden among her daughters. Oliver would take her remonstrance in perfect good humour, but he would not be a bit the better for it. She might quote for his benefit with cutting sarcasm the old tripping compliment to the very wildness of _abandon_ in woman’s dress——

‘Hair loosely flowing, dress as free;
Simplicity more taketh me,—’

and ask him if he thought that applied as well to a man’s toilet?

Oliver would laugh and put up his hand, with a sense of guilt, to his dishevelled moustache, then let it travel further to the Ricquet-like tufts of his hair. He would look down with too tranquil deprecation at the handkerchief dangling by one end from his pocket. But though hair and handkerchief were remedied for the moment, they would be in a worse condition twenty times before the day was done.

Oliver was also spasmodically awkward in his gestures, a peculiarity sufficiently noticeable in a well-made man who had taken his share of muscular exercise and learnt the noble art of self-defence.

Fan’s consolation was that Oliver, though the reverse of a puppy or even alas! of an Adonis, was still unmistakably a gentleman in his most extraordinary _gaucheries_; and when he was roused and in earnest, his passion and determination mastered his mixture of indifference and nervousness, until the bodily movements responded to the spirit within, and acquired a certain untrammelled dignity and power.