Chapter XX

OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED
OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND CO.

There was one man of Friarton descent whose distinguished fortunes occurred not once only to Fan Constable’s mind as presenting a marked contrast to her brother’s perverse crotchet of self-destruction, where his social position and even his material prosperity were concerned. For any tyro might crave leave to doubt whether Oliver Constable would increase or even retain the amount of fortune which his father had bequeathed to him by becoming a tradesman in his own person. As for Fan, she had been fully persuaded from the first that Oliver would ruin himself commercially—no less than socially. Oliver denied the necessity stoutly, and when it was thrust upon him, quoted, as Fan considered, irrelevantly, if not irreverently, the Divine assertion that a man’s life does not consist of the things which at the best he only seems to possess.

Hartley, of the now renowned firm of Hartley, Norris, & Co., had stuck to trade down to the present generation. But then trade had made of the representative Hartley not simply a man, but a gentleman so far beyond challenge that he had not merely been spared from the counting-house and warehouses to Oxford, he had been permitted to become a sleeping partner, enjoying the funds without undergoing any of the toils of the huge, opulent concern which his immediate predecessors had founded, pushed, and fostered by unremitting exertions, giving themselves heart and soul to the business.

John Hartley, in his character of pure gainer by the struggles and victories of his father and partners in their branch of trade, had developed very much into a cultivated _dilettante_. The chief sign he gave of having inherited any of the individual vigour and ambition of his stock, was in the zeal and determination with which he avoided the slightest association—save by name and the receipt of the lion’s share of the profits—with the business. Yet, according to Oliver Constable’s principles, John Hartley stood morally responsible for it in its every detail, down to its pettiest customer and its meanest workman, while his responsibility was not confined to his own business and his conduct in its discharge, but extended to his influence over the whole trading class, to which, in spite of every protest, he distinctly belonged.

Oliver said he would not judge John Hartley. No doubt the man had an æsthetic bent, and he was squeamish where one kind of vulgarity was concerned. These idiosyncrasies led him almost perforce to dedicate himself to the refining of his tastes and the beautifying of his estate and house—well-nigh to the same extent as the squire of Copley Grange dedicated himself to a like evangel. And naturally the sleeping partner and the squire took to each other’s society, silently agreeing to sink into oblivion the gulf between the gentle fore-fathers of the one and the rude progenitors of the other.

John Hartley hit on an earl’s daughter with an equally accommodating memory to consent to be his wife, and never afterwards to allude, except by a calm, smiling, cleverly timed jest, which disarmed criticism and took the censorious world by storm, to the source of the excess of luxuries with which her husband was able to surround her.

It was no business of Oliver Constable’s, whatever he might think; he was not called upon to proclaim John Hartley a cowardly shirker and slurrer over of his obligations, an absentee from his post of duty, a deserter of his class. Certainly Hartley was not singular in his interpretation of the rights and privileges of the inheritor of a great firm and its wealth. He went with the multitude in his use or abuse of the choice of occupations and interests which he commanded. Even an earnest, enthusiastic commentator on the ‘grand old name of gentleman,’ who has proved to the gaping world’s edification that it may be borne by a tradesman of the most unsavoury sort, has been forced by the clamorous exigencies of public opinion to allow her hero a problematical title to gentle birth and to wed him to the noble daughter of a sorry gentleman; above all—strange incongruity to promote the pseudo-tradesman to the rank of a squire, and the society of the country squirearchy, before he dies.

But Oliver was roused from his equanimity when he shared the sensation felt by all Friarton at the news that John Hartley had come down with Lady Cicely and their household to be even nearer neighbours to the Constables than the Stanhopes were, by occupying Copley Grange, lent to them by the squire, while the sleeping partner showed himself wide awake in contesting the representation of the county, just left vacant by the death of the late member.

Hartleys to right of him, Stanhopes to left of him, how could Oliver resist the admission, for the moment at least, that he was with them and not with the Dadd and Polley set, to which he had sent in his adherence? For John Hartley made his first canvassing call on his next neighbour the miller and baker, and though he did not conceal that he was at Friarton Mill to solicit political support, he acknowledged there, as he was prepared to announce on the hustings, that he was a tradesman, and frankly claimed the vote of a brother-tradesman, who understood John Hartley’s circumstances and the advantage of returning him to Parliament.

John Hartley was a quiet agreeable man, handsome, with a slightly affected assumption of Bohemian fashions in his ferocious beard, semi-artistic slouched sombrero, and colossal meerschaum. In reality he had not the slightest taint of the Bohemian about him, being pacific, prudent, and somewhat obstinate. He had only adopted the gentlemanlike Bohemian as being the reverse of the gentlemanlike tradesman.

Lady Cicely called on Miss Constable. Lady Cicely was not childish or girlish, like Agneta Stanhope. The sleeping partner’s partner admired Friarton Mill in a well-bred way, but she never made the smallest pretence of going mad for rusticity or of playing at being a rustic. Neither did she mistake Fan for the typical Miller’s daughter. The visitor took care, notwithstanding, to infer with perfect tact, all the while, that she was a little struck by finding Miss Constable a different person from what might have been expected. Not that Lady Cicely implied Fan was her equal. Lady Cicely was a stout, commonplace, slightly stolid young woman—the least gratifying, to a highly-trained eye, of all John Hartley’s surroundings, so that one had to consider there was that in her origin which indemnified the mind for the loss—bordering on an offence—to the eye. Still she was not without dignity in her double chin, and certainly not without mind; she never lost sight of the fact, or suffered Fan to lose sight of it for a moment, though it was by no means insisted on with unladylike self-assertion, it was quietly taken for granted, that an earl’s daughter and a tradesman’s daughter belonged to opposite poles of society which no two people in their senses could confuse. But she administered the same subtle compensation bestowed by Agneta Stanhope, when the couple of aristocrats agreed in placing Fan quite on a level with her former Friarton patronesses.

In addition, Lady Cicely civilly and sensibly recognised the points in common between her husband and Oliver Constable, and connected the men together by the safe general term ‘business men.’ ‘Mr. Hartley has never taken an active part in the affairs of his firm, he leaves everything to his partners,’ she was so good as to explain to Fan; ‘but of course the interests of trade are his interests, and he will look after them in the House if he is returned for the county. He and Mr. Constable ought to have a great deal to say to each other, so that we depend on your brother’s dining with us next week at the Grange. He must reserve a day for us when we are quite by ourselves—you will keep him in mind—won’t you?’ Lady Cicely almost pled with Fan, though she never dreamt of including the sister, who smiled a little grimly at the significant omission, in the invitation to the brother.

Lady Cicely was too comfortably resigned and independent on her own account to care much for public favour, but, like a dutiful wife, she coveted it, so far as she saw her way to it, for her husband. She desired to see him in Parliament because so many of her set were there. She did not trouble herself much about Mr. Hartley’s being in trade—so many people whom she knew had something to do with trade now-a-days—still it was advisable that he should be pointed out as M.P. for his native county, as well as sleeping partner in Hartley, Norris, & Co.

After all, Fan did not find fault altogether with the Hartleys’ self-interested notice. It was fully understood to be a give-and-take connection. It had none of that sole prerogative of bestowing honour—to which Fan had so bitterly objected in former days. To be sure, the Hartleys were not like the royally frank and free Stanhopes. Oh, no. Mr. Hartley and Lady Cicely would never raise their social inferiors by generous adoption into the upper ranks, or even stoop magnanimously to the lower. Though indeed, had Oliver Constable so chosen, it was in his power to be, in his degree, the man of university training and wide travel, the polished man of civilised society, who had shaken himself loose from all save the money earned by trade, which John Hartley showed himself with the approbation of everybody, save a few fanatics.

But Oliver might make use of the Hartleys, as the Hartleys were plainly disposed to make use of him. Fan was ready in this silent, mutual compact, to be of benefit to the Hartleys; she returned Lady Cicely’s call, though Fan was not to dine at Copley Grange—since it was necessary to draw the line somewhere—and in the course of the call consented to the hostess’s extracting a considerable amount of available information about the place and people from the guest. Fan spoke to her acquaintances down to the Polleys and Dadds of Lady Cicely’s neighbourliness and willingness to confer her countenance on Friarton, in return for Friarton’s votes to her husband.

When Lady Cicely easily succeeded, late in the day, in securing the distinction of being appointed one of the stall-keepers at a bazaar, and the chief patroness of a conversazione in the neglected museum, in the course of caterprises undertaken by an indefatigable eleemosynary committee in the behalf of the local charities, Fan cheerfully worked and catered for her ladyship’s stall, and for the sale of her packets of tickets.

It seemed as if Oliver must be on John Hartley’s committee, the list of whose members soon bore the bold scrawl of Harry Stanhope’s name. The young fellow chose to write himself, with his most unyeomanlike fist, ‘Harry Stanhope, yeoman.’ It appeared as if the Oxford-bred miller must be dragged forward, in his own despite, to take the place which fortune and education had given him, to ride and drive, and lunch and speechify, here and there, in the heat of faction, with those to whom he was really allied, so as to forget the mill and the baker’s shop with their drudgery, and to forget along with them other shops and their drudgeries, other shopkeepers with their aims and rewards—high or low—of which Oliver Constable’s mind had lately been full.

It looked as if Oliver were going to comply with the irresistible demands made upon him as a man and a citizen. He received John Hartley with tolerable cordiality. The one man listened to the other’s private explanations as well as to his public speeches, and, in order to do both fairly, Oliver not only attended the meetings the candidate was calling, but accepted his invitations to dine _en famille_ with him and Lady Cicely. The result, which Oliver could not well avoid, was that a considerable amount of familiarity was established between him and the Hartleys. He was hailed as an ally by John Hartley on all occasions; and it was Oliver’s arm which Lady Cicely took when she left her stall at the bazaar to go to the refreshment table, and when she walked the whole length and breadth of the town-hall in order to make her purchases from her fellow-stall-keepers.

Fan was growing elated at the turn events were taking, and the precedence thrust on Oliver which he could no longer escape accepting. And if he accepted it, he must needs lose sight of his hobby and step involuntarily, as it were, to a vantage ground from which it would hardly be possible for him to retreat afterwards. Mr. Hartley was the Liberal member largely upheld by the tradespeople, who not merely approved of his principles—which, though they had never come to the front before, were unlike his practice, and belonged to his trade descent and trade interests—but were proud of him as a tradesman himself. Still no doubt it was on so gigantic a scale and with such advantages that the ordinary lineaments of his class were a good deal effaced, and that it was out of the question for him to fraternise with the smaller fry. He was also, through his personal antecedents, habits and predilections, and notably through his marriage with Lady Cicely, at one with the opposite side—supported by the great bulk of the professional men who were apt to be more Conservative than the Conservative county gentry and Conservative nobility to whose skirts the professional men clung. It was no matter that John Hartley was fighting in a political battle against Colonel Hastings, the head of the ancient house of Hastings of Westmote and the nephew of the Marquis of Saltmarsh.

The strife in its greatest keenness was conducted with the courtesy of gentlemen. Between their electioneering bouts, the men met not merely as amicable foes, but as social allies in the houses of their common acquaintances. John Hartley and Colonel Hastings agreed to differ. They were more than familiar with each other’s faces. They were members of the same clubs—if not of the Reform and Carlton—of the Alpine and Travellers’ Clubs, and Colonel Hastings was married to an old neighbour and early friend of Lady Cicely Hartley’s.

Therefore it could not be held that Oliver Constable was necessarily consigning himself to farther fraternity with the lower orders when he espoused the cause of John Hartley.

But had he espoused the cause? All at once, with the thrill of a shock—not only to Fan and the Hartleys, but to the whole Liberal party—including the defaulter’s fellow-tradesmen, nay, to the very Conservatives, who gave the newcomer only a half-hearted gibing welcome, as to an erratic wavering adherent, who was not at all to be depended upon—Oliver marched over with his single vote to the enemy.

It sounded as if he were a turncoat, it brought down upon Oliver the indignant accusation and ugly name, though there was nothing on earth to be gained by it, as Fan protested piteously. Oliver achieved the climax of inconsistency by figuring as a Conservative. ‘I am not a Conservative,’ he denied, and then added hastily, ‘but what’s in a name? I never was and never will be a party man,’ he cried; ‘and I am going to stand by Hastings because I think he is less of a party man than Hartley. I don’t say that both are not honest men according to their lights, but Hastings is either better qualified to judge for himself, or he is more bent on acting in obedience to his judgment and conscience. He has pledged himself to do what he can for more than one or two measures which carry justice and righteousness on their face, that I would to God Englishmen of all parties were manly and true enough to unite and carry through, but which are not in the _rôle_ of Hastings’ party any more than they are on the cards of the Liberals. Hartley will not bring forward or second one of these bills; on the contrary, he will throw what weight he possesses in the opposite scale. He has said as much. He is too cautious, too Conservative at heart—under his Liberal cloak if you will—too selfish in grasping and not scattering—not even risking his gains, too bound to a clique to do anything else. I don’t go in for Hastings in everything, not by a long chalk; I am not a Conservative, but since there is only the choice between these two, on the whole I prefer Hastings and his individual politics, let us say, to Hartley and his general creed.’

Oliver might prefer whom he liked. He was a freeborn subject of her Majesty, and undoubtedly he was at liberty to make his selection, but he received little toleration and less sympathy in his withdrawal from his party. His secession was met with a burst of reprobation. Old Dadd called him ‘that hair-splitting fool.’ Mrs. Polley argued it was all very well to have a mind of one’s own, but sheer refractoriness would not sell loaves. See if Oliver Constable had not managed with his college learning to anger his customers all round. She went in for her own opinions, as most of her hearers knew, but for men and women in business not to be able to keep their minds to themselves on occasions, and behave as their best friends had a right to expect of them, which was not to be weathercocks, and fly in the face of their associates and supporters, was rank conceit and impertinence, little short of madness.

Not even Mr. Holland with the deacons of the chapel could pass by Oliver’s conduct without remonstrance, seeing that it threatened serious damage to the brilliant prosperity just dawning on the congregation.

The chapel had been almost to a man for John Hartley. Not that he was himself a chapel-man. As might have been supposed, the plain and pithy, bald and homely Nonconformist worship was extremely repugnant to him. But he had shown that he retained a reserve of his father’s and grandfather’s sharpness in seizing an advantage, when he renewed, in a manner, his alliance with the chapel, in anticipation of his election. He recalled to his recollection, what he had apparently long forgotten, that his father had been brought up a dissenter, and had lived and died a maintainer of dissent in his own person. John Hartley proved satisfactorily his powers of memory, by all at once bringing out a hidden store of knowledge of dissenting annals—exceedingly acceptable to a religious body accustomed to be, not to say slighted, but ignored, by their brethren of the church. He betrayed a sentimental inclination to linger over and dally with these old associations, which served to propitiate the chapel members for his desertion of their communion. He was not guilty of absolute misstatement when he suffered it to be inferred that circumstances had been against him. The difficulties of his position, the entanglements of the circle in which he moved, especially the natural influence of Lady Cicely, had drawn him back into the bosom of a church which was at last bestirring itself, and testifying to the good it had got from the noble protests of the early Puritans and the later Methodists against its periods of latitudinarianism.

John Hartley did not pretend that he would return to the ranks of the nonconformists, and the chapel people of Friarton were too reasonable to expect it of a man like him. But he treated them with great respect, almost with pensive tenderness. He called upon Mr. Holland and mentioned in conversation that his father had sat under the profitable ministry of an able and pious grand-uncle of the Friarton pastor’s. John Hartley requested to be taken into the chapel on a week-day, though it did not seem to occur to him to attend the Wednesday lecture or the Friday prayer-meeting, and then asked humbly if he might be permitted to present new, more efficient, and ornamental chandeliers, to help to shed material light on the congregation—a request which was handsomely granted.

Lady Cicely called on Mrs. Holland, and begged the shape of her baby’s pinafore, thus showing that, though Lady Cicely was by every inherited affinity a churchwoman, she was, nevertheless, so far leavened by her husband’s purer ecclesiastical origin, as not to suspect contamination lurking in a dissenting baby’s bib and frills. The result was that the chapel people—from Mr. Holland to Jack Dadd—were strongly in favour of John Hartley, to the extent of considering him in part their own property and candidate. For though he had not promised to procure the disestablishment of the church, he had engaged to remain neutral on the Burials Bill, while Colonel Hastings was openly antagonistic to dissenting prayers prayed by a dissenting clergyman, over a dissenter’s corpse in a parish churchyard. And the chapel constituents were assured they would procure yet better terms from their member. They began to grow rashly secure of his good offices and to plume themselves beforehand on the distinction that was awaiting them.

Oliver’s fresh secession was therefore not only an affront to his co-religionists, they were driven to reckon him guilty of uncalled-for schism and lukewarm treachery, where the interests of the chapel were concerned. For unluckily, his example affected others—only a contemptible few, no doubt—malcontents, jealous of the leading deacons and the larger contributors, such as were to be found in every congregation, discontented Adullamites, the breath of whose nostrils was mischief. These were mostly men among the poorer members of no repute, who had failed in business, who had erred in their religious profession and moral practice, persons who did little credit to Oliver Constable as his followers, on whom he probably did not count, as he did not encourage their adherence. But he made them prominent to the disgust of the rest of the congregation. He instigated them, whether he meant it or not, when they would otherwise have wrangled aimlessly, to show that ‘the connection’ was divided, to make a definite demonstration, which, however small, was a scandal in the eyes of the magnates of the chapel, for Colonel Hastings.

There were meetings official and unofficial in the chapel vestry and in members’ houses, that the congregation might discuss among themselves the question of Oliver Constable’s delinquency. There were loud and long whisperings about him as not only disaffected, but as a young fellow of dangerous license of opinion, who would in all likelihood end in rationalism and free-thinking. ’Liza Polley regarded him, in horrified fascination, as a dreadful young genius, who, in his pride of unsanctified intellect, dared to defy Mr. Holland and Mr. Dadd. Yet she had never heard such naughty words as Jack Dadd would let fall sometimes, drop from Oliver’s mouth. He was a regular and reverent worshipper at the chapel. Nobody had ever seen him ‘screwed’ or so much as half screwed, though he kept company on occasions with the young shopkeepers of the town. He was understood to be domestic in his habits. He was known to consider the poor with even an excess of liberality, while he sought to do it without observation. ’Liza had heard him laughed at for the absurd rigidity of his scruples in the conduct of his business. But she feared it would be all the worse for Oliver, if he turned out, after all, to be little better than an atheist, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Surely nobody would think him ‘a great catch’ now. The fact that his suit to her had come to nothing, was like one of those deliverances—of which one reads in good books.

Oliver was not left in partial ignorance of the ordeal through which he was passing. Notably the minister, and next to him one qualified member after another, were appointed to deal with the offender. Oliver found the minister the least arrogant and intolerant of his inquisitors. But even Mr. Holland could not see what Oliver thought he saw of the comparative insignificance of the burial of the dead to the welfare of the living. Mr. Holland looked as if he too considered Oliver’s citation of the injunction, ‘let the dead bury their dead,’ misapplied, as Fan had judged his quotation of other maxims which she did not propose to treat as of no weight in themselves. Mr. Holland talked of institutions and organisations, signs and precedents, of the urgent necessity for unity among brethren, of preserving the peace of the congregation, of making everything give place to the great interests of nonconformity in England, of the compulsion laid upon men that they should work with the tools which Providence had put into their hands.

But here Oliver was as obdurate and slow of comprehension as his pastor could be on the respective claims of the dead and the living.

‘Right and wrong can never undergo change or modification,’ protested Oliver hotly. ‘I was a man before I was a Christian. I am a Christian just because I am convinced Christianity is the one sheet anchor and lever for humanity. I was and am a Christian before I ever will be a Nonconformist.’

The result was that Oliver found himself isolated and ostracised, viewed as a contumacious chapel member, suffered of course to continue among the loyal members, because there was no formula by which he could be expelled on such grounds, but no longer trusted and approved of; so far from it, he was in the meantime an object of reprobation to the greater number of his brethren.

Perhaps it could not be helped, perhaps he partly deserved his condemnation. For Oliver was not altogether clear in his judgment and conscience where nonconformity was concerned. He was by constitution a many-sided man, prone to eclecticism on most subjects, except, indeed, on what were to him the eternal verities of right and wrong in life, and in a divinely ordained religion. He must always be more or less at variance with men who were never divided in their minds on the merits of all other questions which, to Oliver Constable, were, to say the least, open to discussion.

He had read and seen a good deal on both sides of English ecclesiastical history. He had sympathies with both. His heroes stood ranked under opposing banners. He gave in his adherence to Jeremy Taylor and Bishop Butler and Samuel Wilberforce, as well as to Richard Baxter and John Wesley and Robert Hall.

But Oliver had been brought up a nonconformist. He had gone with his father to the chapel, while Fan had gone with her mother to the church.

There had been no necessary strife in the family on this account. Peter Constable, though a man of inferior abilities to his son, had possessed some mental features in common with Oliver. Peter had respected his wife’s form of faith as she had respected his. Occasionally he had joined in her service and she had joined in his, but in proportion as there was no rancorous war of creeds, there had been no proselytism. To Oliver the chapel was the church of his fathers, and of his section of the community. He was perfectly sensible of the defects of its system, but he was far from prepared to grant that the merits did not exceed the defects, and still less that the defects of dissenters were more ruinous than the shortcomings of churchmen.

Under this impression, Oliver held it disloyal to abandon the chapel, any more than the class to which he belonged. At the same time he had his doubts and scruples. But just as he was a man of much stronger imagination and capacity for idealisation than John Hartley was, Oliver did not feel offended by the bareness and ruggedness of the ecclesiastical ways he trod. He saw beyond them, even as he saw beyond the modern smoothness and smartness of the chapel building, back into what struck him as the less objectionable gauntness and grimness of its predecessor in which earnest and fervent men had worshipped, often to the peril and loss of their earthly joys and worldly goods. There were records in existence which proved that the chapel had been among the earliest of its kind in England. When Oliver thought that contemporaries and allies of John Milton and John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, Blake and Daniel Defoe—who, it seems, has been convicted of time-serving and double-dealing, but who was so stout and unflinching a patriot withal, that one may be tempted to prefer Defoe’s shuffling to some later men’s consistency—Oliver Constable laughed at the idea of men of narrow and uncultured intellect and vulgar bumptiousness being the sole figures that peopled the region in which he had come to sit apart, conscious that he was looked upon as an interloper and false friend, unworthy of the right hand of fellowship, or of the confidence of his companions.

John Hartley won the election mainly by the support of the dissenters—whom, however, success did not at once soften to the renegade.