Chapter VI: Louisa and Catherine Hilliard

‘YOUR settling down here as a tradesman, Oliver, will be a nice story for Mrs. Hilliard and Catherine,’ said Fan Constable, tartly, over the breakfast-table next morning. For Fan was by no means permanently converted, however touched for the moment, by the last evening’s conversation.

Oliver shook himself with some vigour, but the gesture was so common with him as not necessarily to imply any special depth of feeling stirred by the observation; however, his colour rose as he spoke in answer.

‘What will Mrs. Hilliard and Catherine make of it? what can it be to them? At the same time Mrs. Hilliard puts little weight on social distinctions; you must do her the justice to grant that, Fan,’ he said, looking straight across the table to his sister, and speaking with a degree of emphasis which implied that, in his opinion, Fan was not in the habit of judging righteous judgment where Mrs. Hilliard was concerned. ‘As for Catherine,’ he added, after a moment’s pause, ‘I imagine she is too much in the clouds, as usual, to take much notice of what happens on the common earth.’ He said the words with an attempt at carelessness, but in reality he spoke with an effort, stiffly.

‘Oh, it may suit Louisa Hilliard to profess that she is indifferent to public opinion and independent of it, that she is a privileged, irresponsible person, in short. But you are greatly mistaken if you think you will escape her gibing tongue and impertinent laughter. And you will find to your cost that when the matter is of the least importance she will take care to comply with the world’s standard.’

‘I don’t wish to stand between any genial soul and her jest,’ said Oliver; ‘and I am sure, Fan, you need not quarrel with respect for social standards.’

‘I don’t quarrel with it,’ said Fan, decidedly. ‘I think that whatever the social standards of the past may have been, social standards in our day ought in the main to be deferred to by all sensible people. What I object to, naturally, is that you should insist on running counter to them in order to indulge in a wild dream.’

‘I plead guilty,’ said Oliver.

‘As for Catherine Hilliard,’ Fan went on, ‘she is not too much “in the clouds,” as you call it, to prevent her coming down among ordinary people and saying very stinging sarcastic things. Louisa is only too well content with herself and her belongings; but I think Catherine Hilliard is a discontented girl.’

‘The level of “a low content,”’ muttered Oliver, gratifying his father’s old, half-blind, half-deaf English terrier ‘Ned’ with a sardine.

Fan did not catch the quotation, or notice the typical act: she was leaping to a conclusion. ‘Catherine Hilliard is so dissatisfied with herself and everything around her, that I fancy she will learn to welcome any change of circumstances, until she may get the length of selling herself and her feelings some day. Then, no doubt, after the bargain is completed, she will turn round and decide that this gain also is not worth a tithe of what she has paid for it.’

‘You have no right to speak so, Fan,’ said Oliver angrily. ‘Of course, I don’t pretend to guess how Catherine Hilliard may dispose of herself,’ he went on more calmly; ‘but she has always appeared to me a kind of nineteenth-century vestal virgin, a “Christian priestess of Nature” and such letters and art as have come in her way. That is not the sort of creature who sells herself.’

‘I beg your pardon, Oliver.’ Fan contradicted her brother with mingled dignity and obstinacy.

‘And I beg your pardon, Fan.’ Oliver perpetrated with considerable success a mimicry of his sister’s manner.

‘There,’ he said quickly, ‘as you are always tempted to be unfair to the Hilliards, we had better let the subject drop.’

Fan did not protest against the charge of unfairness, or insist on prolonging the discussion. Perhaps her conscience pricked her a little. She was perfectly sensible in the truthfulness of her nature that Louisa Hilliard was her _bête noire_. Fan used to say to herself without disguise, ‘I can’t bear Louisa Hilliard.’

This was one of the instances of natural antipathy and comparatively causeless dislike, which, like the opposite examples of instinctive partiality, and hardly warranted attachment, were apt to hold sway over Fan Constable’s ardent, concentrated temperament. Hers was not an unjust or undisciplined character, while it was loyal to the core; but it was full of ‘likes and dislikes.’ There was nothing lymphatic or volatile about Fan, to her great loss of ease and tranquillity. If she had been put under an examination as to the provocation she had received from Mrs. Hilliard, who was Fan’s remote kinswoman and early patroness, Fan could not have given any save the pettiest reasons of which she herself would have been the first to feel ashamed. Yet her asperity where this woman was concerned amounted to rancour. Sometimes the sentiment in her own bosom struck Fan as unchristian, and being very sincere in her Christianity, she sought to qualify her enmity by solemnly assuring herself of what was the truth—that she would not injure Louisa Hilliard for the world. It was only incidentally that Catherine Hilliard came in for her share of the dislike which Fan had to Catherine’s cousin. The two younger women possessed nothing in common, but neither had they any sharp points of antagonism. If it had not been for Fan Constable’s extraordinary aversion to Mrs. Hilliard, Fan would have viewed Catherine Hilliard with simple indifference.

Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin kept house together, chiefly upon Mrs. Hilliard’s income, at the ‘Meadows,’ which was at once the largest, and, though it sounds a contradiction, the cosiest, certainly the prettiest, of the villas which had sprung up on the outskirts of Friarton. The ‘Meadows,’ in fact, was more of a small country house than a villa. It entitled its occupant, unless she were a very objectionable person otherwise, to revolve in the first of the social circles—which, like the sap-rings in the trunk of a tree, divided the townspeople into various grades of enclosure. Nay, the ‘Meadows’ entitled its owner to hover on the verge, which she crossed not infrequently, of the county families.

For Mrs. Hilliard was only objectionable in possessing a carelessness of mind—a rather pronounced Bohemianism. She was regardless of who took her up or who let her down, which had an effect the reverse of what some people might have expected. As she was also a lively agreeable woman, superficially refined, a well-endowed, comely widow of thirty-five years of age, who relished her freedom too keenly to have any thought of marrying again, but who kept a pleasant house and welcomed her friends to it, she was lifted clean above the ebb and flow of social fickleness; she was landed in established popularity with _carte blanche_ to do very much as she pleased, and fill up her visiting-list just as she chose.

In fact, Mrs. Hilliard’s house was what the vicarage often is in country society, a sort of neutral ground and meeting place for different classes—or degrees of classes, in the community—not that its mistress would descend so far as to receive ordinary tradespeople and fraternise with them, Fan now reflected, gloomily. Yet Mrs. Hilliard had opened her doors to the brother and sister since they were a mere boy and girl, and had in her turn visited at Friarton Mill. And she had not come exactly as the Fremantles and Wrights, the dignitaries of the Grammar School, had come, because the mill family, so far as it had to do with Oliver, might be regarded as in a transition state, and on the point of taking flight into higher regions; but because Mrs. Hilliard, though a well-born, well-married woman, the daughter of a rural dean and the widow of a commodore, was really distantly related to the Constables through their mother. Mrs. Constable, as Fan never forgot, had been the daughter of a clergyman, not a dissenting minister but a regular parson of the Church of England. But, after all, there are clergymen and clergymen even of the Church of England. The poor curate who had been Mrs. Constable’s father had lived and died in very different circumstances from those of the comfortably situated rural dean to whom Mrs. Hilliard had owed allegiance. The curate, to begin with, had stooped and married the daughter of a yeoman, who on his part had not enjoyed any of the plain plenty apt to be associated with a great farmhouse. Accordingly, the curate’s brood of children had been brought up in a spare as well as homely fashion, until they had been sent out into the world to earn their living, and make their own way, as clerks and nursery governesses; one of those governesses, with her limited education and still more limited earnings—not to be compared to a good cook’s wages—was found not unwilling to exchange her anxious dependence and drudgery for the serene independence and importance, in her own sphere, of the mistress of Friarton Mill. Strange to say, the fact of the slight tie of blood between the two women failed to prevent Mrs. Hilliard from settling at Friarton when the Meadows offered itself to her and her man of business—at once as a good investment for her spare money and a suitable house which she could make a home.

Stranger still to relate, Mrs. Hilliard was too secure of her position, and too defiant of censure, to ignore for a moment the thread of relationship between herself and the Constables of Friarton Mill. On the contrary, she proclaimed it openly with evident cold blood whenever she had occasion to do so, compelling confidence and respect in her hearers. For if Mrs. Hilliard could afford to make light of, nay, to sport, her far-away cousinship to the family of a provincial miller and baker, her acquaintances might rest on the conviction that she had substantial claims on their regard in much closer alliance with the families in canons’ houses in cathedral closes, in government houses abroad, in pleasant little houses near Hyde Park or at Kensington. But in reality the eccentricity belonged rather to the idiosyncrasy of the woman than to the remoteness of the relationship which she elected to count with the Constables.

Mrs. Hilliard had been ready to hold out her hand to the Constable young people, which was one of the offences Fan, though she could not dispense with the hand, had not been able to forgive. This was not pure perversity and ingratitude in Fan Constable. It was the result of the observation that Mrs. Hilliard laughed, without taking the trouble to conceal it, at Fan’s serious pretensions, and that the older woman was as little, as the younger was much, in earnest.

The Meadows was a wide white house, cheerful in its whiteness, and, at the same time, amply shaded and sheltered by old and luxuriant shrubberies, of which the Portugal laurels, Irish yews and hollies were giants of their kind, while the lilacs, Guelder roses, and syringas offered, in their season, pyramids, piles, and thickets of flowers. The public rooms were all on the ground floor; and, in the case of the drawing-room, the long French windows, which faced the south, opened to the lawn with its clumps of rhododendrons and brakes of thorns, and its glimpse in mid distance, through an archway of roses, of the flower-garden.

The drawing-room at the Meadows was the sunniest, most cheerful room in a house the great distinction of which was resolute, sometimes slightly overpowering, social sunshine and cheerfulness. Mrs. Hilliard used to call it an ‘Omnium Gatherum,’ a flagrant instance of eclecticism where rooms were concerned. Its furniture, and the occupations she engaged in there, did not date beyond her own reign at the Meadows, and so would have been pronounced worthless by connoisseurs. But, as Mrs. Hilliard maintained, she had lived long enough to have seen several styles of decoration and ladies’ work, and her drawing-room proved with what catholicity of spirit she had ‘gone in’ for each in succession. The only drawback was that she could not make up her mind to be entirely off with the old love in order to be on with the new. Thus she sacrificed the great aim of the last exposition of high art—unity, to her unprincipled softness of heart and lack of sternness of purpose. She retained the cold whiteness and pompous glitter of the upper part of her walls, and the undue warmth of colouring and floweriness of her carpets—attempting to combine them with dirty orange dados and sage-green _portières_, just as she kept the faded gorgeousness of her Berlin woolwork in stripes of bold embroidery divided by bands of imperial purple and emerald-green velvet, or in great groups of Queen of Sheba flowers like the exuberant flower-pieces of Flemish painters, introduced into close contact with the dim, delicate conventionalities and studiously faint, long-drawn-out effects of nineteenth-century, art needlework. It was a highly objectionable compromise from an artistic point of view, but somehow it was not only saved from absolute frightfulness, to a Philistine it had a charm of its own, because of its little bit of mellowed, blended life—such as one may occasionally meet with, on a grand scale, in a pile of building which began by being a feudal castle, and went on to be an old English manor-house, then progressed into a Georgian mansion, ending by proving the many-sided home of a race. So time with lingering fingers had toned down and tempered the robust gaudiness of the abused Berlin woolwork till it too had acquired something of the exquisitely soft harmonies of ancient tapestry. That was Catherine Hilliard’s opinion, and she had a fine eye for colour. The chairs and tables, the books, the pictures and the china in the room, were all about as incongruous, and yet all in a manner represented some phase and echo of human life, and had come to fit into each other.

So much could hardly be said with regard to Catherine Hilliard and her surroundings, as she stood listlessly looking out of one of the long windows on the lengthening shadows falling across the lilac flowers of the rhododendrons, and waiting for her cousin coming in to afternoon tea. It might be because Catherine belonged to all time that she did not belong particularly to that room—in which, however, the window where she stood with its round table, heap of books, letter-case and blotting-book, work-basket, and Nankin jar holding a bunch of purple and pink and white pea-blossoms, constituted Catherine’s sanctum and private properties.

Catherine Hilliard was a young orphan cousin of Louisa Hilliard’s, who, when she left school with a bare competence, had been invited by the mistress of the Meadows to share her establishment. Catherine had accepted the invitation on the stipulation that, in proportion to her more slender means, she should pay her share of the joint housekeeping. ‘Catherine is such a dragon of pride for a young girl,’ Mrs. Hilliard explained to anyone who had a right to be made acquainted with the details of the arrangement, ‘that I dared not propose to her to come and live with me and let me keep house for both. Yet she might have the sense to guess that her company is a boon to me, though she has little sympathy with my pottering commonplace ways, and lives in an intellectual world of her own. It is my single regret with regard to Catherine that she is a bit of a blue stocking.’ But though Mrs. Hilliard professed and half persuaded herself to believe the contrary, in reality she neither objected to Catherine’s contribution to the general expenses nor to the different line she took in society. Mrs. Hilliard’s hand was not so open that it had not its seasons and occasions of closing, and she did not care to run the risk, slight though it might be, of a rival in her special field.

Altogether the arrangement, which had continued from the time that Catherine Hilliard was eighteen, up to the present date when she was in her twenty-third year, had answered admirably. Mrs. Hilliard was the reverse of exacting, and she was even forbearing and indulgent where Catherine’s dissimilar tastes and habits were concerned. On Catherine’s side she was not so ignorant and abstracted in her want of knowledge of human nature and absorption in her own pursuits, as to be unaware how much colder and more forlorn a place the world would have proved to her, if Mrs. Hilliard had forgotten their cousinship and had not extended to the girl an older woman’s friendly protection, and given her a home with a member of her kindred. Catherine cherished in silence and reserve sentiments of gratitude and affection for her cousin Louisa, and was a good deal more under her influence than could easily have been supposed. But there was a hitch—what miners call ‘a fault’—between Catherine and ordinary humanity, the consequences of which were so plain that Fan Constable, who was not in the other girl’s confidence, could read them though she could not trace them to their source. Without near ties, without clear, positive duties—apart from the obligation to keep the ten commandments and lead what she understood of a Christian life, Catherine Hilliard was thrown back and in upon herself, which, unless as a discipline to teach her how insufficient she was for any achievement she really valued, seemed about the worst experience she could have encountered. She was like a plant withdrawn from the wholesome, common, out-of-door influences of sun, rain, wind, and a touch of frost, while the plant is at the same time subjected in one part of its cellular tissue to the strain of over-stimulus and over-cultivation. Though Catherine lived in a house full of lively movement, with many comers and goers, though she was on excellent terms with the house’s mistress and its circle or circles, the girl remained always like an unfamiliar visitor in what served her for a home. She was only in, not of, its circles. Catherine’s was largely an inner world of fancy and feeling; its scenes furnished by the vivid representations which she drew in her mind, of places and incidents met with in her books; its characters, ideal personages, ghosts and shades—goodly ghosts and heroic shades, no doubt, but destitute of the substantiality and warmth, and what is salutary even in the provoking contradictions, the piteous failures, the tough warfare of flesh and blood. There was a certain bloodlessness and fantasticalness about Catherine’s world, amidst much that was noble and sweet in it. She had an aching consciousness of a hollow emptiness about it, and not of a gaping void alone, but of a harsh discord between it and the actual world. She felt herself getting more and more fastidious and captious and—she feared—horribly selfish. She moped a good deal, as well as mused. She dreaded instinctively she knew not what, as the result of her star-gazing and hero-worship. She was conscious she shrank from the common work-a-day world and from the vulgar and mean interests—often, of ordinary people with the common business of life on their hands. But she did not know in the least how to give up her habits, or reconcile herself to society as she found it. She was helpless in the bondage she had made for herself—yet she was frequently more weary and disgusted with herself than she could possibly be with any other person. But Catherine had one great resource against morbidness, though she repaired to it as to other occupations, either listlessly, or with a fitfulness in her temporary eagerness, resorting to it with no distinct comprehension of what a safeguard it was to her, from the consequences of the continual exercise of those faculties which were already over-wrought.

Catherine was exceedingly fond of animals, and she happened to be free to express her fondness, since she was not merely the mistress of half-a-dozen pets of her own, she was the sovereign protector of the whole animal kingdom as it existed at the Meadows. She was likewise the head-gardener on the spot. For Mrs. Hilliard had nimbly seized the opportunity of a floricultural tyrant’s throwing up his good situation, in a fit of pique, to get rid of her hired oppressor permanently. She had then vested in Catherine supreme authority over a junior gardener and a boy who were well broken in to obedience. The only obligation which Mrs. Hilliard had imposed on her cousin was that she should not indulge her predilection for Shakespearian flowers in the beds, and untrimmed luxuriance in the shrubbery, to the extent of banishing every choice pelargonium and perfectly quilled dahlia, which had formerly crowned Mrs. Hilliard with honour at flower-shows; neither should Catherine be guilty of corrupting her subordinates to the degree of reducing the grounds to the picturesquely disorderly level of the gardens of a French or Italian country house, so ruining the established reputation of the Meadows for the trimness which is the English gardener’s delight.

Catherine, always overwhelmed as she was, not with bracing work, but with a dreary surplus of vacant time on her hands, in spite of her reading, was fortunately capable of revelling, in her desultory fashion, in this double resource. She would leave Dante in the saddest region of the Inferno, the Jungfrau when the Black Knight had her at last, Mary Barton pursuing the outward-bound ship, Janet in the agony of her repentance, to take refuge in her own section of the living world. She would play for half-an-hour with Pepper and Crab or the youngest kitten. She would watch the eight rooks whose big, black-coated presence always seemed to Catherine to lend a solid dignity to the fry of small birds, just as the rooks’ deep cawing supplied a solemn diapason to the lighter music of the orchestra in the shrubbery on a bright morning in spring, or a quiet evening in early summer. Catherine stoutly maintained the innocence of the rooks against the respectful representations of the modest under-gardener, that the birds did not confine their bill of fare to worms and the wide genus grub, as she was fain to assert. And after all, the alleged depredations committed by the rooks, were as nothing to the frightful accusations brought against a pair of demure sinners of Cushat doves, which were like the apple of Catherine’s eye, for whose condescension in coming of their own sweet will and building a nest in an old Scotch fir, and their affability in indulging in soft cooings, she could never be sufficiently grateful. Catherine scouted the idea of replacing the wild pigeons by a couple of their tame kindred, which should be housed in a neat little pigeon-house, submit to be fed with grain and crumbs from feasts, or fly far a-field for their meals instead of proceeding with the marauding instincts of the most incorrigible of thieves, and alas! in spite of their sleek, iridescent plumage, and the tender sentiment associated with them, of the greediest feeders belonging to the feathered tribes, to devastate whole rows of newly-sown peas and ‘breaks’ of young cauliflowers.

What did Catherine care for peas and cauliflowers compared to her Cushat doves? But Mrs. Hilliard, though she found some food for laughter in the doves’ exploits and Catherine’s dismay, was not so indifferent to the wreck of her vegetables. Catherine was very much obliged to Oliver Constable for telling her, though it was in a measure another disillusion in the way the information was put, that wood-pigeons were the most arrant cowards in addition to being the most disgraceful thieves, for the most transparent sham—the least life-like scarecrow—sufficed to hold the robbers at bay.

Catherine was as well acquainted with every bird’s nest within her bounds as were the Friarton boys, whom she could not keep out of the shrubbery in the bird-nesting season, and whom she detested with an illogical detestation—to say the least, enough to show that she had never had a brother. She would suddenly start out on these boys from a little wilderness of green branches, and assail them with a torrent of passionate reproach. The boys would stare blankly at the apparition they had aroused, but any unwonted bashfulness, if excited at all, would speedily give way to a sense of the utter disproportion between cause and effect. The result would be an ironical titter or guffaw (for the Friarton boys were by no means models of good manners), and a noisy, careless retreat to be followed by a return rendered doubly certain by Catherine’s injudicious challenge.

Catherine retreated too, covered with swift mortification for her extravagant anger. But it was difficult to be patient with those young savages, who could no more be barred out than the waves of the sea could be held back, who would make short work in one holiday afternoon of all those exquisite little homes of moss and leaves, leaving the poor, fond, helpless architects fluttering in despair round their ruined dwellings and pillaged treasures of blue, green, black and red spotted, and freckled eggs, or, more precious still, downy, yellow-beaked, tottering, gaping fledglings. The nests were perfectly beautiful and sacred to Catherine, and she took great pleasure in visiting them all round every morning, with elaborate precautions not to disturb family arrangements or trouble heads of houses in the performance of their duties.

Catherine was almost as happy and much less liable to worry, among her lilies, of which she cultivated an infinite variety; her trailing love-lies-bleeding, like a warrior’s plumes heavy and drooping with the red stains of battle; the golden shields, with the dark discs and the stiff grenadier stalks, of her sunflowers; the pinked perfection and spicy breath of her clove carnations. She would hang over each of them, and touch them with a lingering, fondling touch, as if they were sentient creatures, and could welcome and respond to a friendly caress. She hated to shorten their brief blossoming time; she would never gather them with lavish wastefulness. She liked to have them near her at all times, and so would take a tribute from their abundance to ‘busk’ her person and the Meadows drawing-room, but she never did it unsparingly and recklessly.

Catherine Hilliard was of the middle size, but looked taller than she was from the slenderness of her figure. Her hair was of that dubious colour which enemies called red, friends auburn, and gushing admirers golden. In reality it was each tint as the light fell on its simple braids and twists. Her complexion was fair and pale—too waxen, in spite of her bird-herding and gardening, for perfect health. Her nose, mouth, and chin were well and softly moulded. But the results of her temperament and circumstances were visible in her personal appearance. There was a languor which had no vital purpose to conquer it, evident in her air, that threatened to drain away the last remnant of what ought to have been the healthy hope and joyousness of her years. Her mouth had a sensitive, plaintive droop. The expression of her eyes varied continually from hesitating dreaminess to spasmodic enthusiasm, from short-lived enthusiasm to intolerant scorn, from quick scorn to morbid depression. The beauty of Catherine Hilliard’s face, as it struck strangers, dwelt principally in the dark blue of her eyes. Withal, she was by no means strictly beautiful, only endowed with a peculiar charm for those on whom the charm worked at all. She had a fancy for gowns of thin material, in their season, like summer clouds floating round or clinging to her, according to the atmosphere, in the dry heat of noon, or in the slight dankness of the dew point. But she preferred the colour of her gowns to be softly dark like the clouds after sunset, thus instinctively rather than deliberately setting off the fair paleness of her complexion. She kept her cousin Louisa marvelling where Catherine could find so many misty purples, heather browns, and cool slate colours, as well as naval blues, of a wire-woven texture. Catherine wore a gauzy gown of a deep plum-colour at this moment.