Chapter III: Oliver’s Announcement

THE brother and sister met with the ‘Here I am, Fan,’ and the ‘So you’ve got home, Oliver,’ of the thoroughly English brother and sister, who, however cordially attached and however much they may have to say to each other on particular occasions, rarely exceed such words—accompanying the grasp of the hand, and the kiss on the cheek, even on meeting after months of separation. Effusive speech and lavish caresses are not for the true representatives of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Oliver, in writing to his sister, when his name was in the prize list, had so far forgotten his origin as to let his pen slip into the short regretful sentence, ‘He would have been pleased that I had not missed the mark.’ But even on paper he did not further specify the tie, and now Oliver gave no sign of remembrance, that it was the first time he had come home and failed to receive his father’s greeting. For the old man was yet alive, though on his death-bed eagerly watching for his son, when Oliver obeyed the summons which had last brought him to Friarton Mill. It did not follow by any means that Oliver forgot the past, though he remained dumb as he followed Fan to her room.

‘Do you sit here now, Fan?’ he asked his sister with a little surprise, and an involuntary tone of disappointment. But even as he spoke, he began to reproach himself privately for the question—so like a man’s blundering to put it, within the first moment of his arrival too. To be sure poor Fan still found the old sitting-room too full of sad memories to be encountered without an effort. How could he, even in imagination, have condemned a girl to sit alone where the old family circle had been formed, with a dreary sense of a blank never to be filled up, in one corner, and in one chair, constantly present to her mind? It mattered little what room they occupied just then, and only a stupid, thoughtless fellow would have drawn attention to the change, thus carelessly probing the wound.

Oliver hastily directed the conversation to something else, without waiting for an answer to his question, and in doing so accepted the new domestic arrangement without protest—all the same his thoughts had been dwelling vaguely but persistently throughout his railway journey on the familiar low-browed room. The local attachments, which did not exist for Fan, approached to a passion in Oliver’s nature. He had seen, without trying to see them, his father’s big chair and ponderous writing-desk, opposite which Fan’s little table and work-basket used to stand. He had contemplated idly and half absently as if he had been on the spot, the high wooden chimney-piece painted grey, and having in relief, only in stucco unfortunately, clusters of wheat ears—as if the chimney-piece had been designed expressly for a miller and baker’s hearth—the corner cupboards, the odd nondescript article of furniture in old mahogany which was neither side-board nor side-table, nor cabinet, but which had the handiest shelves, the roomiest drawers conceivable. At this season the purplish red roses were budding in such profusion round the windows of the old parlour, that if a high wind came when the roses were in full bloom, their petals would—as Oliver had seen them before—be stripped off, and swept in a stream on the faded worsted moss of the carpet as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa. There were seats in the windows on which Oliver had often gathered up his long legs and disposed of his arms in an attitude the most excruciating to the eye of the spectator, yet the most restful to the body of the performer. Oliver had been addicted, from boyhood, to employing these low window ledges as convenient steps to the court, a practice which obviated any trouble of opening and closing doors. He had been prone to sitting half in half out of a window, with his legs dangling to the ground; when he occupied the post in June, he had felt himself like an old Greek crowned with roses, and as it was his only chance of such a distinction he had borne with stoicism sundry pricks and scratches from aggressive stems, and faced philosophically the dropping of rose leaves—possibly of earwigs and ladybirds—within the collar of his coat.

Oliver was exceedingly fond of the old parlour, and he was decidedly not fond of Fan’s drawing-room; at the same time he was cast in a different mould from the Squire of Copley Grange. Oliver had his own views on æsthetics as on everything else, but the pattern of a wall-paper or the tone of a carpet did not cost him agonies. He was not always calling out for calm and repose and key notes. His residence in Oxford had no doubt cultivated his taste without his knowing it, but the training had failed to beget in him a special mania—apart from intrinsic beauty or pleasant associations—for old oak and blue china, Venetian glass, or Queen Anne needlework, unless the last were the homely old garden-flower which bears that name. Now, as it had more than once occurred to him, if Fan had been in some of the men’s rooms, and had possessed rooms of her own, she would by this time have been engulfed beyond the redemption of her natural taste in a charmed region of dim and soft hues, faded colours and faint tracery varied by bold interjections; she would have sat surrounded by mystic dados, quaint Indian and Japanese matting, stately Jacobian chairs, gorgeous peacock’s plumes and sunflowers. Yet it was Oliver and not Fan—as both were aware—who was imaginative and susceptible. Except where her prominent bump of order was concerned, it was he and not she, who was sensitively affected by the surroundings; above all it was he who was tenderly faithful to his first love in household gods, as in inanimate nature.

Oliver and Fan Constable talked at dinner of the hundred-and-one nothings which the members of one family, meeting after some months’ separation which has not divided the speakers in more than space, find to interest them. Oliver took occasion to remark, _à propos_ of the dinner itself, that Sally Pope had not lost her skill, and that he was quite able to do justice to her fried soles and lamb cutlets though he had dined at Paddington. He had not meant either to try Sally’s patience, or to keep Fan’s dinner waiting. He had intended to come in for her tea.

‘I don’t mind dining late, indeed, I greatly prefer it,’ said Fan with decision; ‘and since—since poor father is gone,’ it was an effort for her still to get out the words, though she showed no inclination to cry,—she was not the ordinary sort of woman, who is given to express her deepest feelings in tears,—‘we have not his tastes and habits to think of first. There is no need for you to dine early after you have been so long accustomed to dine late in hall.’

‘The hour for dining in hall is not considered late feeding-time now-a-days,’ said Oliver, carelessly; ‘but it is a great deal too late for me,’ he added, with more interest. ‘I am not like you, Fan; I detest dining late. I stick to one o’clock as the hour which appetite, common sense, the testimony of our ancestors, and the practice of our continental neighbours have all agreed to honour. I know what you are going to say, that noon is the correct time. Well, I don’t object to anticipate matters; dining at noon is nearly the only mediæval custom, about the restitution of which, with advantage, I am quite clear.’

‘I was not going to propose dining at noon,’ denied Fan, emphatically; ‘it would be an exceedingly inconvenient arrangement, unless households rose at daybreak again.’

‘And why not?’ inquired Oliver, innocently.

‘Why not, indeed?’ retorted Fan, with lively impatience. ‘It is sufficient they don’t, and few people would like to form solitary exceptions. You may try it yourself if you like; not that I mean to say you’re a bad riser as it is.’

‘I don’t often see the sun rise in summer,’ acknowledged Oliver, penitently, as he carved Sally’s _pièce de resistance_. He carved badly—worse than his father had carved, causing Fan, who was an expert in such feats, to fidget and marvel afresh. But Oliver himself was not in the least put out by his deficiency in table accomplishments.

‘If sunrise is so well worth seeing in Switzerland,’ continued Oliver, ‘it cannot be wholly unworthy of our notice here, as our actions seem to imply.’

‘But if you get up in time for the sunrise, you must be content to go to bed with the sun,’ said Fan; ‘when all your neighbours are widest awake and fullest of life.’

‘There’s the rub,’ admitted Oliver, shaking his finely-proportioned head, with its towselled thatch; ‘but there ought to be some compensation.’

‘I don’t think you men, wise as you are, take consequences into consideration sufficiently,’ dogmatised Fan.

‘My dear child, don’t treat us to ironical flattery, though I grant ours is a belated kind of wisdom, so that we have to go to you women to make it practical for us. There was Greatorex, one of our tutors, who kept me in company in groaning over dinner in hall not being supper and the winding up of the day at once, supposing we were condemned to eat a meal in common. You will say the remedy was in Greatorex’s hands as well as in mine, but he never found it till he married a nice young soul who condescended to work out his theory for him. He has his dinner now at the time he ought to have eaten his lunch, but generally forgot or made a muddle of it. He is saved from becoming an ignoble martyr to mingled starvation and dyspepsia quite as much as to work. He has his evening stroll or his book, and his wife’s music by his own fireside in winter, when other men are at table, where he can join them for a little variety when he chooses.’

‘Ay, the little variety when he chooses, which no doubt will be pretty frequently, makes all the difference in the world,’ said Fan, drily. ‘But I thought, Oliver, men could not work after dinner?’

‘Can’t they?’ questioned Oliver, with equal dryness. ‘What! not after an hour’s rest such as a labouring man takes? Why, they do it every day they live when they eat a sufficient meal and call it luncheon. If they eat less it is at the peril of their health, with the temptation to gorge in the evening.’

‘But head work, Oliver, head work,’ remonstrated Fan.

‘Is much like other work,’ maintained Oliver, stoutly. ‘It is not head work which stands in the way. Are you such an innocent as to suppose that head work is the engrossing occupation of the mass of the men at Oxford, or, for that matter, the mass of late diners? You may as well say prayers and have done with it. Bless you, Fan, I wish you saw some of the drags coming into the town, or watched the men in their boats at every hour of the twelve save the dinner-hour. True, many of the undergraduates do their reading on the water, only the subjects of study are apt to consist of the “Field” or “Bell’s Life,” or the fastest, trashiest novel.’

‘But you read, Oliver,’ protested Fan, almost indignantly, for she had not so many cherished visions that she could afford to have one demolished in this cool manner.

‘Oh yes, I read,’ he asserted, as the simplest matter of course. ‘There are always some fellows who sap, some men whose business and pleasure are made up of reading under any circumstances. And I may give it as my experience that a proportion of the reading men are of my mind and Greatorex’s. How I did envy Greatorex going home to eat his wholesome little early dinner—call it a dinner of herbs, if you like—in peace, tête-à-tête with his wife, in his own little dining-room; returning to Mrs. Greatorex’s cheerful, pretty tea-table, walking with her, having his book, and his lounge, and smoke, his song and his chat afterwards; supping with his family, perhaps bidding a solitary beggar like me, who did not go in much for riotous “wines,” share his supper, like a Christian and a gentleman.’

‘But “the feast of reason and the flow of soul,” the very spirit of the feast, there would not be room for that, Oliver?’ It was characteristic of Fan that she never contracted her brother’s name.

‘“Oceans of room,” according to Traddles the immortal. Where there is a will there is a way, Fannikin. Besides, you are referring to a rare sort of spice, not often to be found at any dinner, “late or ear’,” as Sandy Carmichael would say. Now you are the lady of the house, will your ladyship let me carry the claret, and the strawberries, and biscuits over to the mill gallery? It is the hour, as a hundred poets have sung in a thousand styles of verse, as well as the season for enjoying the cream of out-of-door delights, including beetles and bats—but I’ll smoke the last away to a respectful distance if you object to them. Don’t let us lose more of the first evening, and Fan, what an evening! The sun is not to say shining on us, he is setting for us, like an affable, royal old fellow, at the height of his June splendour. Come along, Fan.’

She would much rather have gone to the drawing-room, but, to do her justice, she had always humoured Oliver in trifles. She went with him without apparent reluctance, only trying in vain to make him leave the transference of the wine and fruit to the housemaid, whom Fan had drilled into a deft and dexterous table-maid.

‘No, no!’ Oliver would have his way; ‘you go before, and I follow after. Imagine yourself a lady of the last century, Fan, with a black boy grinning, and covetously eyeing the best strawberries in the dish, at your heels.’

Then she had to wait a little impatiently till he exchanged a jesting compliment with Sally Pope, who had smoothed her ruffled plumes, put on her afternoon gown, and was ready to waylay and have a word with the young master on his return, as he passed across the court. Had she not done so, unquestionably Oliver would have repaired to Sally’s region of the house before the end of the evening.

‘Welcome home, Master Oliver, the sight of you is good for an old woman’s eyes,’ Sally hailed him.

‘Of course, Sally, and ain’t I growing a handsomer fellow every day? As for you, why you look a dozen years younger than you did last summer. You’ll be having the banns put up, and coming upon me for a wedding-present before I have time to think what it shall be.’

‘Come, now, Master Oliver, none of your young man’s chaff—and me old enough to be your granny,’ remonstrated Sally, with great relish of the stale joke.

Fan was considerate of Sally’s claims where they did not interfere with the girl’s own plans. She was substantially kind to the old woman, and Sally, like everybody else who came in contact with Fan, had a just respect and regard for her young mistress. Notwithstanding this laudable sentiment, Sally looked upon life in the light that it was alike her duty and privilege to bear her testimony against the crying sin and folly of new-fangled, upstart ways, and to resist them to the utmost of her power. The opposition was fruitless; Miss Fan got the better of the old housekeeper, and Sally was not without a secret, half-grudging admiration of the girl’s capacity for ruling.

But the old servant entertained a totally different kind of pride in Master Oliver—of fondness half-protecting, half-reliant for him. She detained him at this moment entirely with his own will, though to the chagrin of his sister.

Fan could not understand Oliver’s accessibility to servants, and his ease with them. She was tempted to think he did not know and keep his own place where they were concerned. On the other hand, this conclusion did not coincide with some of her independent observations. Fan had a candour and liberality of observation, in spite of her essential narrowness and concentration of mind, which forced her often to remark effects that puzzled her in her rooted convictions. Fan had learnt from local gossip that there was something of the same bearing as that of Oliver towards his servants in Mr. Ayott of Copley Grange to his confidential and superannuated gamekeepers and nurses. She could not be altogether sure that the simplicity and geniality were not among those secrets of good breeding which were somehow beyond her acquisition. Certainly no servant abused Oliver’s frankness and _bonhomie_.

The brother and sister stood in the twilight darkness of the oldest room in the mill, empty at this hour. Oliver would have paused again to make comments on what machinery was dimly revealed, and what store of grain could be faintly discerned. But Fan, who had never from her childhood cared for such details, nipped his intention in the bud and dragged him on. ‘You said you wanted to be in the open air, dear; don’t stay in this musty-fusty place, where I always dread rats.’ Then they went out into the gallery.

Oliver pulled out a pile of new sacks to serve as a seat for Fan, and converted a full sack into a pedestal to support the tray he had carried. For himself he was content to loll on the old carved railing, hunching up his shoulders, sinking his head in his breast, thrusting out his bearded chin, squaring his moustached mouth, and blinking with his brown eyes, contriving altogether to look as like a dwarf or humpback, with the grotesquely ugly face which would have served for a gurgoyle, as a stalwart, comely Englishman could well look.

At the couple’s feet flowed the Brook, over which the long pendent boughs of the great willow drooped and swayed and dipped their leaves—the blue-green of which was whitened, yellowed, and stained with olive in the water. Before the two stretched the undulating bosky park of Copley Grange, with the rich foliage of its fine trees still in the gay vivid green of June, before it has grown dull, heavy, and monotonous under the heat of July, with the red and white clusters of the thorns competing with the red and white spikes of the chestnuts. The sun was sinking like a ball of fire in the gold and crimson west, where all the magnificence of the sky was still gathered, leaving what had been the dim soft blue of a midsummer day, for a moment, by contrast, cold in its purity in the east.

No nightingale yet lifted up his voice and poured forth his fervent appeal, but a whole chorus of thrushes and blackbirds spoke and answered in their hearts’ content. Occasionally the continuous gurgle of the water was broken and accentuated by the leap of a trout or the splash of a water-rat.

Oliver looked and listened in silence for some time, turning his face to the sunset light. Then he suddenly, and as it were, involuntarily, took off his cap, and the radiance about his head brought out threads of chestnut and gold in his brown hair.

He drew a long breath—a kind of sighing heigho! as with a depth of enjoyment that by reason of its very depth had a strain of sadness in it, because of the shallowness and transitoriness of all human pleasure, and then announced, confidentially, that people ought not to boast, but he believed Friarton Mill in its own peculiar line beat England, beat Europe hollow for beauty.

‘Yes, it is beautiful here,’ said Fan, quietly, with her eyes turning naturally to the pillars and arcades of that unfortunate Italian front to Copley Grange, seen at the end of the vista directly opposite the mill. ‘I know judges object to the house, and Mr. Ayott cannot bear it. If he had money enough he would pull it down and begin rebuilding to-morrow. They know best, no doubt, and I am prepared to be told it is bad taste in me, but the house always strikes me as stately and imposing.’

‘I was not thinking of the house,’ said Oliver; ‘but I don’t see why it should not be allowed a sort of English classicism, though of course its Italian classicism is humbug here. It is not without associations,—calls up George Lord Lyttelton and Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets.”’

‘Not to me,’ said honest Fan; ‘but I wonder,’ she persisted, sticking to her idea, and desiring, without changing the conversation abruptly, and putting a point-blank question with brutal plainness, to lead the talk to the great point with which she began to think Oliver was dallying, seeking to keep it in the background, ‘I wonder you are so little critical of Copley Grange and so much in love with Friarton Mill after you have been at Oxford.’

Oxford was Fan’s Rome or Jerusalem. She had visited Oxford more than once in Commemoration Week, and though that was hardly the proper season at which to estimate academical glories, it had been enough for her to see her brother at home among distinguished men and refined women. Fan secretly hoped that Oliver’s destination, with her own in his company, would be Oxford. In spite of what he had told her, his university town still stood to her in the light of the capital of the great English empire of letters—not a Bohemian empire, but such a dignified, decorous, learned empire as Fan’s soul loved, to which Oliver had a birthright and title, to which his claim would be Fan’s passport. Nowhere else, she fancied, could they without pretence get into such good society, escaping finally from the penalties of the most unvarnished trading antecedents.

‘Everything in its own place,’ said Oliver, lightly. ‘I am fond of my “’Varsity,” too—of every stone of my college. I think Cambridge is the only place worthy of being named in the same breath with Oxford. I do not give a rap for the pretensions of Salamanca, or Padua, or Paris, or Heidelberg, or Zurich, or Edinburgh, matched with those of Oxford and Cambridge. I am as besottedly proud of my “’Varsity” as an Oxonian and a John Bull can be. But after all, my connection with it, though I shall never forget it, was a passing accident compared to my life-long connection with this place.’

Fan’s hopes fell a little. Oliver’s words, however appreciative of his ‘’Varsity,’ did not indicate an intention of returning to it and settling in it. ‘I am afraid it will cost you a pang to leave Friarton Mill,’ suggested Fan, still feeling her way to her object, as the sincerest woman will sometimes.

‘But I am not going to leave it,’ said Oliver, with quiet assurance, staring down into the water, as if in contradiction of the words which the poet had put into its mouth—

‘Men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.’

‘At least, not so long as I can help it, I hope,’ Oliver corrected himself quickly; ‘not till I have to make that exodus which lies before every mother’s son of us.’

‘My dear boy, what are you thinking of?’ Fan was driven to ask, in discomfited surprise and bewilderment. ‘Father was not able to make you independent of a profession. You may, indeed, become one of the masters of the Grammar School in the town here. But oh! Oliver, I am sure it would be a great mistake. The Fremantles and the Wrights,’ naming the families of two of Oliver’s old patrons among the masters, ‘have been kind, but even they, while they are ready to acknowledge your honours, don’t forget that you are the son of a tradesman.’

‘They are heartily welcome to remember it,’ said Oliver, with perhaps more heat than there was occasion for. ‘What! deny our father, Fan, who never did a thing to be ashamed of? which is what few men’s sons in any rank can say. It is my turn to wonder. My origin is the last thing I should wish my associates to forget if I were to become a master in Friarton, which I have not the slightest intention of being.’

‘You know that is not what I meant,’ protested Fan, growing pale with reproach and excitement; ‘I loved and honoured father with all my heart, Oliver, you know I did. And it is no dishonour to his memory to say that while I am proud to think he had qualities far above those of an ordinary tradesman, I am sorry he had to go into trade, and to continue in it all his life.’

‘I don’t know what you call an ordinary tradesman,’ said Oliver; ‘but though I am perfectly aware that you were the best of daughters, Fan,—I would not for a moment think of questioning it,—I must in common truth blame you for inconsistency. My father, who was as you say all his life in trade, had not the opinion of it which you appear to hold; and I must say to look upon trade as degrading, is rather an odd way, though you don’t intend it, of honouring the man who was pleased to be the miller and baker of Friarton.’

‘Father was an old man who belonged to another generation than ours,’ Fan defended herself.

‘I have no doubt there were as many fools in the past generation as in the present,’ growled Oliver, not very politely, but his spirit was beginning to kindle into a flame.

‘He got on in the world,’ continued Fan, paying no attention to the growl. ‘Our starting-point, thanks to him, is not what his was. He was willing that you should go to Oxford and become a scholar and gentleman.’

‘Yes, God bless him!’ said Oliver, shortly.

‘After all I cannot think what we are arguing about;’ Fan took herself back with a faint smile. ‘Over what you imagine is my undervaluation of trade—but that is past so far as we are concerned. And I promise to respect any profession you may choose, Oliver.’

‘I am not going in for any profession,’ said Oliver, still a little moodily. He was a man by nature eager for the sympathy of those he cared for, though he was not dependent upon it, and he knew he would get no sympathy from Fan in what he was about to do, therefore he had instinctively put off to the last moment telling her his intention.

‘Are you going abroad then?’ inquired Fan, with her heart sinking fathoms deeper than at its first disappointment.

Was Oliver, her only brother, all that she had in the light of mere kindred, deliberately purposing to cut himself off from her? He professed to put small weight on his advantages; but was he meaning to let them—as in the case of so many men who rose in the world—be the means of creating a gulf between him and the single person who represented his relations and his early life? Which of the two was the inconsistent person?

Oliver penetrated so far into Fan’s suspicions—they were altogether unjust, but they were too cruel towards herself for him to resent the reflection they cast on him.

‘My dear Fan, didn’t you hear me say I was going to live and die at Friarton Mill?’ he contented himself with putting it strongly.

‘But what are you to do here?’ demanded Fan, in a voice half mystified, half sharp. She felt a little relieved; but such a terrible suspicion was rising in the background of her thoughts that it threatened not merely to cloud her returning serenity, but to overwhelm it more entirely even than the apprehension of her brother’s forsaking her had done. Oliver at his best had always been somewhat incomprehensible to Fan, unmoved by the things which keenly affected her, powerfully worked upon by influences which did not touch her. They had always been an affectionate brother and sister, but in some respects they had never been of one mind and soul from babyhood upwards; she felt at this moment of doubt and alarm that she could not venture to predict what Oliver might not do or leave undone at any crisis of his history.

‘Of course be a miller and baker, like all the heads of the family I ever heard of,’ said Oliver, trying hard to look and speak as if he were not aware that he was inflicting a shock on his sister. But the fact was he was agitated in giving his decision, and he showed the amount of his agitation, by relinquishing the bodily contortions in which he was prone to indulge. He stood up tall and straight facing Fan, merely thrusting his hands into the depths of his pockets, as he proceeded to unfold his intentions. ‘I shall bolt the cleanest flour, and bake the purest bread, and have my finger in the capital and labour pie—there is an appropriate figure for you; and as bread is the staff of life, and the capital and labour question one of the most vexed questions of the day, I should think the duties and interests involved will last my time.’