Chapter XXXII: ‘do They Believe in Me Now?’

Oliver Constable’s announcement that he was retiring from the baking business had appeared three times in the Friarton weekly newspapers. The first time it was received with scoffs and sneers, the next it was met by a troubled silence, the last time it was anticipated by an urgent protest, though Oliver did not happen to be within hearing. The earliest result of his advertisement—so far as Oliver knew—came in the shape of a formal call in the back shop from Jim Hull.

Jim had never entered the premises since he and his nephew ’Arry set up a rival business. Oliver made no question that Jim came now with some proposal from the flourishing firm of which he was one of the representatives, while he indulged in an austere satisfaction at the realisation of his own prophecies of the certain consequences of Oliver’s new-fangled, hair-splitting scruples and crotchets. Anyway, Oliver thought, Jim Hull might have saved himself the trouble. It was execrable taste in him to come and crow at all, in the circumstances.

‘_Et tu Brute!_’ Oliver said in spirit to his father’s old friend and servant, who arrived to speak to Oliver of his acknowledged failure, and to suggest Jim’s nephew’s further rise on Oliver Constable’s downfall.

Neither did Jim seem to prosper on his heartlessness and vindictiveness. He looked much older and greyer, and his fine, well-cut face was all creased over with the wrinkles which had been just perceptible, here and there, two or three years before. The face had always looked compact, but now it had a contracted appearance, as if Jim had got into a habit of setting his few teeth and drawing his grizzled brows together, by the hour.

‘Master Oliver,’ said Jim hesitatingly, ‘will you not think twice of this resolution?’

‘I have no intention, Jim,’ said Oliver shortly, as he drummed on the table before him; and then, scorning to make use of a subterfuge, he added, ‘It is not in my power.’

‘Not though I bring you the earliest information that my nephew ’Arry is also giving up, leastways selling his business here?’ said Jim, leaning halfway across the table in his earnestness. ‘He has got word of a famous opening in London, which is a field as will suit him better,’ said Jim, in a lower tone, sinking back in his chair.

Oliver was taken by surprise. He could only say it would be odd if Friarton were left without bakers, except the small fry. But there could be no difficulty in finding a purchaser and successor to such a _thriving_ business as Jim and his nephew had established. Were there no other nephews of Jim’s?—Oliver remembered a whole family of sons, cousins of Harry’s—to take the place of the ambitious fellow who thought Friarton beneath his further attentions, and would, no doubt, die Lord Mayor of London? Oliver had—he could not have told why, unless in the underlying sense of bitterness produced by the contrast with his own experience—put an emphasis on the epithet ‘thriving’ which he had applied to Jim and his nephew’s business.

The stress on the word caused Jim to wince. A dull, faded red suffused the old servant’s withered face, and caused positive pain to the quondam master. What right had Oliver to taunt Jim with his success? Was not the old man at liberty to make his methods, in which he saw no harm, succeed to the utmost of his power?

While Oliver took himself to task, Jim was informing him, ceremoniously, that the only nephew he had in the baking trade, besides ’Arry, had gone to Australia, ‘and well for him,’ muttered the speaker. ‘But I was thinking, Master Oliver,’ resumed Jim, wistfully, ‘that you might take ’Arry’s business, of which my share would go far to buy up the goodwill, and carry it on instead of the old one here.’

‘What, Jim! because I have half ruined myself with the one, go on to wholly ruin myself with the other?’ said Oliver, with a forced laugh to hide his perplexity and embarrassment.

‘But things is different,’ insisted Jim eagerly. ‘It were the opposition—of which there would be no more, not a scrap—as did for you; and I would manage for you again, if you liked to have me. There’s a deal more work left in me yet than some folks think for,’ Jim put in resentful parenthesis, flicking away the remains of flour from his sleeve. ‘I’m not the man as would advise another man, least of all you, Master Oliver, if you will believe me, to fling good money after bad; but here is the finest chance as ever Providence made—on purpose, I had a’most said, for you to retrieve your losses, and build up Constable’s business again on a firmer foundation than ever, and carry out your schemes to boot,’ cried Jim, waxing enthusiastic, ‘if you’ll not go and fling it to the dogs in a pet.’

Oliver was fairly puzzled. He was a man tenacious of his principles and projects. So far from being wearied out by disappointment and thwarting, and glad of the excuse to throw the baking business over, it ‘riled’ him thoroughly, tortured and mortified him, to resign it and all the hopes he had set upon it, after what they had cost him. He was strongly tempted to catch at the most distant prospect, consistent with common prudence, of resuming the trade, and waging it thenceforth to a triumphant issue, for the benefit of his fellow-men.

But what of the old practical difficulties with Jim? Oliver was not disposed to yield an atom of what he looked upon as trade righteousness. Sooner sacrifice half-a-dozen businesses, or promises of business, than make a holocaust of his trade creed, which was a prominent part of his Christian creed. Jim, with the hold on his master which the manager’s having largely contributed to buy back the business must give him, would be in a position to maintain his opposite views, while Oliver would no longer have the power to object to them, far less to put them down.

‘I am greatly obliged to you, Jim,’ said Oliver, at last, ‘and not the least for this—that, in spite of the mull I have made, you speak as if you had some faith in me still. But I am not cured of my hobbies; I am as great a fool as ever, you will think, when I tell you that I cannot be in business as a baker and suffer artificially-whitened bread, or fancy bread which is not weighed, to go out of my shop. Besides, I do not know what other eccentricities might occur to me, which I should feel bound to see carried out.’

Instead of the half-repressed disgust which Oliver had expected to excite, Jim met the declaration with a shame-faced assent. ‘Never mind, Master Oliver, them are trifles after all, and it’s erring on the safe side. Yes, sir, I’m bound to say to you this much—it’s erring on the safe side,’ raising his voice, and speaking sternly, while he fumbled nervously with his watch-chain.

With the exception of another abrupt sentence, ‘I’ll swallow all your stipulations, and stick to you like a vice, now, Master Oliver, never fear,’ it was all the admission Jim Hull ever made to Oliver of having found himself the wrong man in the wrong place. But it was enough to recall to Oliver’s mind stories he had heard, only half believed and never repeated, of the sort of bread which the new business had gone on to sell in Friarton. A young doctor, who had taken upon himself the office of unpaid analyst in defence of an ungrateful public, had pronounced the bread largely and most perniciously adulterated. ’Arry had advanced a long way before his sickened and horrified uncle in courses which Jim had found himself utterly unable to restrain to mild, half-openly-confessed, traditional trade liberties. London was indeed a fitter field for ’Arry’s genius.

The day has long gone by when the outbreak of deadly epidemics aroused the frantic outcry of poisoned wells and poisoned loaves. But are the water and the bread provided for the people really pure and wholesome? Has the time not come for the old charge to be revived in more measured and reasonable tones, without any thought of vengeance on sins which are those of ignorance—however wilful—sloth, and haste to make rich, not of deliberate conspiracy and barbarous treachery against human health and life?

‘But, Jim, though you consent to bear with my fads, I am afraid the Friarton people will still find them insupportable. They will still clamour for bread of chalky whiteness, varying in size as well as in shape. I have wearied them out with my efforts to be honest and do them good against their will.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ said Jim decisively. ‘No one will wag a finger against your bread. They have come to know better. Bless you! they are ready to swallow wholesale any stuff you may offer them.’

Oliver stared, then thinking Jim was making another covert allusion to his nephew’s tolerably extensive experiments on the palates and digestive organs of his customers, Oliver delicately waived the point in discussion.

Oliver Constable and Jim Hull talked for some time on the practicability of Oliver’s stepping into a vigorous business in place of laying down an exhausted trade. The longer they talked, the more Oliver became satisfied of the possibility and advisability of the proceeding—that the career he had proposed for himself might not be cut short, and that he might have the chance of rising like a phœnix from its ashes.

The last thing which vexed Oliver was that Jim pressed him to go in for the new premises—reared by Jim and his nephew—which were in full working order, rather than transfer their business to the Constables’ bakehouse and shop, which had latterly been only half used.

What! Give up the shop Peter Constable had proudly built for his son, which Agneta Stanhope had foolishly called ‘the ancestral shop,’ with all the kindly associations to which Oliver was so susceptible, and remove into these brand-new premises, destitute of any association except that they had been raised to knock down the other, which they had done!

Yet all was true that Jim argued. Time and tide were sweeping away the old traffic from the old channels. The new premises were in a better situation than Oliver’s. They had commanded ampler space and secured freer ventilation. They were more commodious and convenient. The spot on which Peter Constable built his shop had long been looked on with a covetous eye by those public-spirited citizens of Friarton who held that the town should have a new town-hall worthier of the name than that in which Oliver had delivered his lecture on Wordsworth, and Lady Cicely Hartley had been a stall-keeper in a bazaar. The town was flourishing in funds at the present moment, and the talk about the town-hall was actually passing into deed. If Oliver were to sell the piece of ground on which his shop and bakehouse stood to the new town-hall committee, his exchequer would at once be considerably replenished. There was no resemblance between the shop and bakehouse and Naboth’s vineyard. The former had seen their day and effected their purpose. Peter Constable would have been the first to pat his son on the shoulder and enjoin him, ‘Sell, my boy; sell when it is wise and right to do it. My memorial, my idea! Never mind them. Would I have had them stand in the way of your progress, which is the progress of your work? They have taken care of themselves hitherto, they will live again like everything which has real vitality in it, in a new mould, shaped to the fresh needs of a later day.’

The treaty in hand between Oliver and Jim Hull was still unsuspected in Friarton when Oliver found his back shop and his leisure a second time invaded—not by delegates from his journeymen bakers; truth to tell, they were the last to comprehend intelligently and to give in anything like a cordial adherence to their master. It was a deputation from his fellow-tradesmen that next waited upon Oliver. The party consisted of old Dadd, Polley, who had enough manhood for a deputation in which his wife’s bonnet and gown would have looked out of place, and another shopkeeper—the saddler, whose bill to Harry Stanhope Oliver had taken care should be paid in full.

They were so occupied with the ceremoniousness of their mission that Oliver could hardly get them to sit down or put their hats out of their hands; and old Dadd, who was the leader, kept saying ‘sir’ to Oliver at every other word. They had not come to ask the miller and baker to go into the vestry or council as a step to becoming churchwarden or mayor. They had no notion of giving him a dinner or a piece of plate—solutions to the formal visit which, luckily, never crossed Oliver’s mind. They had come to more purpose.

These tradesmen—representing very nearly the whole shopkeepers of Friarton—the deputation had furnished themselves with a list of the names—were there to beg Oliver to withdraw his announcement of retiring from business. ‘We feel, sir, you are an honour to our order,’ said old Dadd, with as much spirit as if it were an order of knighthood. ‘Sir, we mayn’t all see with your eyes, or be prepared to carry out your views to a _t_, but we do see they does you great credit. We are quite sure, sir, the world and trade in the long run, would be none the worse of a few more gents like you in them. So, Mr. Oliver, to retain you among us, we, your fellow-shopkeepers in this here town, ’umbly and ’eartily solicit you to keep on your late worthy father’s business. And we are here, sir, in a body, or as the representatives of a body, to pledge you our support in such plain reforms and improvements as you think fit to introduce. We ask you to excuse us for not being wide awake to their crying necessity from the first. Sir, men could not speak fairer,’ wound up Dadd, in some elation at his own eloquence.

There was more behind. This flattering petition came from the general body of the shopkeepers, stirred up by their leaders, who, in their private capacities, had something else to say. It was Dadd, again, who acted as their mouthpiece, and, though not quite so fluent, was as fervent and ’earty as before. He remarked, abruptly, there were some favours no man with a heart in his breast could think of repaying, to which sentiment Policy chorussed incoherently, ‘No, nor no woman with a heart in her bosom—quite so, quite so, Mr. Dadd.’ Then old Dadd went on to press on Oliver, in the friendliest, most considerate manner, such an advance in money as these three could afford, to tide him over the temporary difficulties which might have induced him to give up the baking business.

It was all clear to Oliver at last, while he shrugged his shoulders, grimaced fearfully, and stammered out his thanks, assuring the gentlemen there was no occasion for their last act of friendship, but he would never forget their generous sympathy and confidence, never. The truth was it warmed his heart, and he was not at all sure that if he had gone on to say this was the proudest moment of his life, there would have been the least hypocrisy in the trite hyperbole in his case.

Yes, it was pleasant to have won some appreciation—however little deserved—from his fellow-townsmen, who ought to know him best, to be assured that they gave him credit, after all, for meaning well.

The nature of the acknowledgment touched and softened Oliver more than he could express. He wished his father and Fan might know it. As he went out into the streets afterwards, he was sensible of breathing another air, of his face being irradiated with a different light. He was no longer surprised that he encountered so many friends, and that they were all so friendly. Of course they must see he felt that everybody was almost intolerably kind, till he could have wished they would not come round a beggar so, and demoralise him with their kindness. ‘Do they believe in me now?’ Oliver was saying to himself, half sadly, in the midst of his gladness, half incredulously still.

Oliver’s feet, like fate, at this crisis, carried him in the direction of the Meadows. All danger of infection from Jack Dadd’s fever was over, and nothing could be more salutary for the reformer, to prevent his losing his head altogether, than the cold douche of Mrs. Hilliard’s laughter, and Catherine’s indifference, in contradiction to the absurd excitement of the rest of the inhabitants of Friarton.

But the instant he was shown into the Meadows’ drawing-room—cheery even on a November day, Oliver discovered that the antidote he was seeking was useless, or rather that there was no such corrective. The town’s dilatory admiration and gratitude were there before him, in all the excess in which they might be expected from women. Mrs. Hilliard’s inveterate jests sounded very much as if they were uttered to save herself from breaking down, and her jolly voice grew shaky when she asked after Fan’s baby.

With regard to Catherine, she might still have been silent and stiff, had she not been penetrated, stirred to the depths of her nature, and spurred on by a full share of the public feeling. So much so, that when they were giving Oliver tea and he had cunningly worked round the conversation to a neutral topic—the new orders of nurses and the new theories of nursing—Catherine, her pale eager face, and eyes alight and aglow, with an expression which had all at once acquired a certain likeness to Fan’s, suddenly turned round on him and told him barefacedly, with the clearest personal application—Sister Elizabeth’s opinion was that her own work was good, but it was a better and nobler work to prevent the evils which took such costly sacrifices to cure them. When a man stood to his post, laboured to clear away his share of the abuses which had crept into all trades, and called nothing common and unclean—that was preventing great and widespread evils.

‘Oh, Gemini!’ groaned Oliver, gathering up his long legs in a marvellous coil which would have done credit to the brothers Davenport, ‘don’t you two go in with the others to make a fool and a hero of me!’

‘Who shall prevent us?’ cried Mrs. Hilliard. ‘If the town take it into its thick head to give you its freedom on an exquisitely illuminated card—the illumination done by the most accomplished young lady in the place—or if it think fit to crown you with an olive-wreath covered with goldbeater’s leaf, you will have to submit. It would never do for you to be ungracious, that would spoil everything.’

‘Then don’t let the town take it into its head. Upon the whole, you had better all suffer me to go away in peace, before you recover from your delusion.’

‘It is not now we are deluded,’ said Catherine. ‘Our eyes have been opened, so that we—some of us, no longer see men and women—not so much like trees walking, but as hideous caricatures. We see plain at last, and recognise our kind—our kin, God-sib—our gossips, if you will, as God made them, through what they have made themselves, or what their neighbours have consented to make them. Do you think so lightly of us as to imagine we shall ever forget the sight? Do you not know it is like life from the dead to recognise brothers and sisters—a great multitude which no man could number, wherever we turn? No, you will not have the heart to go away from Friarton,’ she finished, in a lower tone which was still audible to him, as she played with her spoon, ‘just when we are beginning to understand, and when God is going to show you the work of your hands, and to establish it.’

Oliver made an excuse to cross the room with his cup. On his return to his seat, he paused behind Catherine Hilliard’s chair, and said for her ear alone, ‘Take care, Catherine, or else you will be more cruel in the end than in the beginning.’

‘Have I been cruel?’ she asked, drawing back shyly. But this was the season of settling accounts, and he deserved full payment. ‘No, not to you,’ she whispered tremulously, with a soft smile. ‘If I was cruel, it was to myself—never to you.’

Mrs. Hilliard entered her protest, later in the evening; for Oliver stayed to dinner without troubling to go home to dress, and he was still lingering, talking, as he had never talked in his life before, after Mrs. Hilliard had reminded him there was such a ceremony as locking the doors in most households. Then she suggested, ‘If there are to be two enthusiasts, social reformers, muscular Christians—whatever you like to call yourselves—instead of one, and I’m sure one was quite enough to come to grief, what is to become of me, I should like to know? I shall have a bad time of it, for though Catherine is her own mistress, there is such a being as an indignant ex-guardian, and I’m not her sole cousin. When all trades are held alike, and everybody is respected, half of my occupation will be gone, while my ungrateful kindred, whom I have suffered to set good, sound long-established social distinctions at defiance, will never admit a laughing hyena into their menagerie.’

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

Transcriber Notes

The following are corrections to the original text.
p108 “markts” changed to (the places and markets).
p165 added period to end of (Stanhope’s last letter.)
p240 “backshop” changed to (back shop from Jim Hull.)
p261 added period to end of (in the beginning.’)