Chapter XXVIII: Oliver’s Return

Death, and not marriage, wipes out offences, clears scores, and opens the bolts and bars of shut hearts a little, for a brief space. Harry Stanhope’s relations mostly wrote to condole with the young widower on the death of the wife whom they had never countenanced. Lord Mount Mallow—after all, only a connection by marriage, who happened to be then disporting himself in the playground of Europe, actually offered to defer climbing a mountain and come out of his way to grace Fan’s funeral.

Agneta Amyott wrote impulsively, instead of penning a letter in which, while the proprieties were well preserved, the writer committed herself to nothing. She was deeply grieved, not merely for her dear old Harry, but for her dear sister, her former kind friend, whom Agneta declared she would now give half the world to be able to see, if but once again. And what about the darling little baby? What could three young men make of such a charge? It was deplorable to think of it. Would Harry let her send a trustworthy person to fetch the baby, now that she had a home of her own to receive it in? There were the little Amyotts’ nurse and nurseries all ready. She had not been able to speak to her husband yet, but she felt certain Mr. Amyott would not object. To be sure, the close of Agneta’s letter, in which there was the first note of hesitation, sounded more natural than the beginning.

Harry rejected each overture not so much bitterly or pettishly, as with the first sternness and obduracy which had ever burst up through his constitutional softness and irrepressible buoyancy. ‘Nobody shall mourn for Fan but the real mourners—you, Horry, and Constable and me.

‘Fan’s baby shall not be taken out of charity into the house of any man—or woman either. She shall not be brought up as we were, if I can help it.’

Fan’s baby succeeded to what was left of her mother’s little fortune; she might also have the reversion of what Harry and Horace could keep of their legacy. In the meantime she was not given over to the tender mercies of three ignorant men, though, even if she had, she might have fared worse. There was not a woman, high or low, in the Swiss hotel in which she had been born, who was not interested in the small specimen of humanity, and there was one woman—a hard-working clergyman’s hard-working wife, loitering and rather pining abroad while doing her best to get rid of the lagging, idle weeks of her husband’s necessary holiday—who pounced upon the motherless baby as a windfall, or rather, as she would have called it, a Godsend.

Oliver had not been greatly attracted previously to these reverent Weatherleys, in any chance intercourse which he had held with them. He had respected them as very worthy people, but they had seemed to him, what they were, somewhat fanatical and narrow in their views. As for Harry Stanhope, no two persons could have been more widely removed from what he had proved hitherto, or could have possessed less in common with his past, than the strongly professional as well as pious couple who were taking, but scarcely enjoying, a compulsory breathing space in their toiling life.

But from the moment that Mrs. Weatherley’s motherliness appropriated the care of Fan’s baby, Harry, as it were, instinctively—with another of his instincts of self-preservation probably—took to her and clung to her and her husband in his misery, with a pathetic dependence and trust, to which they were not slow to respond.

Indeed, Harry’s remorse from an early stage assumed the form of contriteness rather than despair, his natural humility and amiability standing him in good stead here. Fan had willed his rescue from folly and evil with her whole devoted heart, and though he would never now have the consolation—the positive gladness, of proving to her that he was a rescued man, and so, of more than making up to her, in her love, for all the anguish he had cost her, he was still, in his present mood, eager to do what Fan had wished, to be as she had chosen for him, in his best interests. He trusted brokenly that it might atone—if it were only to her memory, that Fan might know he was sorry and was pulling himself up, somehow, sometime—that Fan’s God and his would accept and confirm the late repentance in the great redemption He has provided for sinners.

Poor Harry had never been proud, and he was not afflicted with the insane egotism which sees in its possessor an object of such consequence in the universe, to his Maker no less than to himself, that he must needs interfere with the working of human and divine love. Such a one-sided reasoner will hold, against every assurance to the contrary, that he has sinned beyond forgiveness, and it is too late for him to repent and think better of it. In fact, there is a false Mephistopheles dignity and subtle compensation in this conclusion, when shame, regret, and grief still take the attitude of resentful defiance.

But it was not so with Harry, not even in his way of regarding his baby. He did not turn from it, in the beginning, with the blind repugnance and unreasoning, unrighteous grudge, with which some widowers are tempted to regard the child that has cost its mother her life. Certainly it was not her child, but her husband, who had killed Fan. Yet Harry might have been so far dishonest as to have given a sop to his conscience, by shifting a part of the responsibility and blame on the innocent child. He might have taken a cruel satisfaction in revenging Fan, by trampling alike on his own natural affections, and on the just claims of his infant daughter.

But Harry never did so. He seemed rather to transfer at once to the baby all the fondness for the mother which was thrown back on his hands, when she was taken from him. In addition he was ready to lavish on the child a double portion of the protecting affection which, so long as he was himself, he had shown to Horace.

Watching Harry in the new light of his mournful fatherhood, when he was called on, by every generous and manly impulse, to be father and mother in one, to the mite whose best friend or worst foe, whose nearest natural guardian, he found himself, Oliver Constable arrived at a correct conclusion. If any mere human creature could help to make a man of Harry Stanhope, could raise him from his soulless levity and the vicious craving which was grafted on it, it was—strange yet natural to say, not a brave, devoted woman like Fan, who had gone down into the breach and held a shield over her husband, and striven vainly to be the stay to him which, had their relations to each other been what they ought, he should have proved to her—but this merest atom of a fellow-mortal, a thousand times weaker than Harry himself, who could neither appeal to him nor remonstrate with him, who could simply hang heavily upon him in her helplessness, and who was, humanly speaking, altogether at his mercy for happiness or wretchedness.

Oliver was inclined to believe that Harry’s self-conviction had gone to the root of the matter, and that even his most mercurial temperament would never shake it off altogether.

Harry was well-nigh as sacred a trust bequeathed to Oliver by Fan as her child could be. Indeed, while there were many humane people to interpose and accept the gracious task of befriending the motherless babe, who would volunteer to fill the thankless office of standing by Harry and backing him in resisting the poison which was coursing through his veins, and the familiar demon that beset him? But in the meantime Oliver was not frightened to leave Harry Stanhope with his brother, his infant, and the Weatherleys. When Oliver recalled the last he confessed he had been unjust in asking incredulously who would bestow themselves on Harry unless to serve themselves by his undoing? So far from a knowledge of his former offences disposing the Weatherleys to withdraw from the old offender, it would only attach them to him more firmly. For a sinner who had turned or who gave the faintest indication of turning from the error of his ways, had, if it be possible, an almost morbid fascination for the clergyman and his wife. They were not content with fulfilling the divine commission, and preaching the grand truth that their Master would have mercy and not sacrifice, their zeal ran away with their discretion until they would have preferred the dying thief to the Apostle Paul. They went the length of selecting for their friends and associates rueful transgressors, in preference to men and women who had been kept and had kept themselves, with infinite pains, from gross transgression. This enthusiastic weakness which caused the Weatherleys to dote on reclaimed burglars and pet converted infidels, almost to the cold exclusion of people who had refrained from picking and stealing, and who had reverently trusted and believed, was apt to be fertile in producing wrath and restiveness in the intolerantly honest and loyal sections of the community; and, what was still worse, in growing crops of hypocrisy and fraud among the hardened and desperately deceitful outcasts from society. But at least it rendered the couple safe to care for Harry Stanhope and do their best to help him, and Oliver did not think that Harry would abuse their kindness.

Oliver Constable did not hurry post haste, though he turned his face in the direction of Friarton Mill, when he separated from his companions, in the course of a few weeks after Fan’s death. He knew that many changes as well as a great blank awaited him, and he sought to fit himself to meet them in a spirit of peace, as well as to find healing for his recent wound.

It was a soft, grey October afternoon when Oliver, leaving the railway at an intermediate station as before, walked through the well-known fields in their autumn livery, and arrived at Friarton Mill.

As it chanced—a chance for which she would never forgive herself—Sally Pope, who had not been apprised of the exact date when he was likely to return, had gone on her yearly holiday to visit her relations. Only a strange young housemaid kept house and received Oliver, taking in good faith his assertion that he was her master.

The dreary reception had, as a compensation, a certain relief for the traveller; but he was not long left to his own thoughts. He had hardly eaten the meal which his servant improvised in a state of consternation, with regard to a future searching investigation and sharp condemnation of all deficiencies by old Sally, when he became aware, as he was in the act of strolling half mechanically across the court, to his former smoking station in the mill gallery, that he was threatened already with visitors from Copley Grange. A lady and gentleman were walking across the park, and making straight for the picturesque old mill.

Oliver groaned under this ill-timed manifestation of the popular admiration shared between show places and show people, and prepared to make himself scarce. He stopped short in his retreat, and faced the intruders, the moment he recognised that they were Mr. and Mrs. Amyott.

The couple were the most put out by the encounter, for they had clearly not expected to meet the miller in his own domain. It might be that the squire was but partially informed of his young wife’s former familiarity with Friarton Mill as well as with Copley Grange Farm, and that he had proposed to take advantage of the fine afternoon by making her better acquainted with what was, still more than the artistic almshouses, a charming æsthetic advantage belonging to his place.

In that case Mrs. Amyott might have had some difficulty in evading the proposal, or she might have been fain, on her side, to get over the first visit to Friarton Mill in a new character, as early as possible, in the absence of its master.

These explanations were more probable than what had flashed across Oliver’s mind, and caused him to contort his figure by one of his old excited, awkward movements, in a revulsion from a crying case of heartless selfishness. He had thought for an instant, could the Amyotts possibly have guessed the half-resolution which he was only turning over in his own mind, to let or even sell the mill and mill-house, and quit the neighbourhood, where there seemed nothing remaining for him to do, where he had tried his utmost to work out his notions of duty and a career, and had signally failed? Did the Amyotts know, from Friarton gossip, that the Constables’ baking business in the town had diminished to such a fraction that, in justice to himself and his coming creditors, Oliver must give up the premises from which the business had departed? Were his nearest neighbours seizing the first opportunity, with indecent haste and mean covetousness, to sound him, in the hope of, at the same time, obtaining Naboth’s vineyard and getting rid of Mordecai at their gates?

Perhaps Mr. Amyott trusted to an immediate, tempting, and what he might imagine a substantially handsome offer of purchase, at a fancy price, to induce a man, impoverished and embarrassed by his crotchets, to sell his birthright, and so to secure to the owners of Copley Grange what one of them had long craved. If that were so, a man might well pray to be delivered from the mania for high art, prevailing to the extinction of common feeling. For was not the dainty bride, in her refinement of bridal finery—sobered down still further by the necessity of wearing a black gown, in memory of her brother’s late lowborn wife, keenly desirous, under her pretence of mourning, to cut away the last link between her and the Constables? And all the while she might have guessed, if she had cared to use her woman’s wit, how much of old Peter Constable’s honestly and laboriously earned money had gone to fill up the gaps left by Mrs. Amyott’s brother’s reckless improvidence.

It was only for a moment that Oliver indulged the suspicion. He saw almost immediately that the Amyotts were as much taken by surprise, and more put out, than he was, though they recovered themselves with the comparative celerity and ease of well-bred people, who were, by their nurture and position, master and mistress of social situations, and equal to any social difficulty.

For that matter, Agneta did such justice to her training and played her part so well, that Oliver felt inclined to think she was lost as a simple squire’s wife, and ought to have been a duchess, if not a princess of some reigning royal family, or a queen in her own person. She exhibited precisely the proper amount of feeling for the occasion, without being overcome. She was touched, she was gently courteous and even friendly to Oliver, without overstepping the limits which the circumstance of her having become Mr. Amyott’s wife imposed upon Harry Stanhope’s sister. She alluded simply and sadly to ‘the melancholy event’ of Fan’s death. She enquired with interest when he had heard from Harry, and expressed her earnest good wishes for the welfare of ‘the dear little baby.’ She broke off to thank him with grave sincerity for all he had done for her brothers—though, with regard to the last graciously grateful speech, Oliver could not avoid the impression that Agneta considered him in some respects the obliged person, by having had it in his power to serve the Stanhopes.

When the conversation strayed to more general topics, Mrs. Amyott referred with a blending of judicious candour and tact—while her slightly stooping, and slightly grey, but well-preserved husband was paying her the lover-like compliment of listening with pleased attention to every word she said—to the changes which had taken place in the Mill court since she was there last. She displayed thus with perfect serenity a considerable acquaintance with the landmarks.

‘Surely, Mr. Constable, there have been some boughs lopped from the willow; and, ah! you have had the old seat, which I used to call “the Pilgrim’s seat,” removed from under the mulberry-bush!’

Every word was in such unexceptionable taste; Oliver was let down so gracefully and gradually from the terms which Agneta Stanhope had insisted on establishing between them, during those vanished summer days, that he was inclined to acquiesce in the squire’s conviction that his last acquired gem was the most finely polished in his whole collection of treasures.

In comparison, Mr. Amyott’s _rôle_ required little from the performer, but he also acquitted himself admirably, with just the degree of admission of Oliver’s claims which became a gentleman who would not disallow an obligation, and yet who viewed, with reason, the whole connection between Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill as a foolish mistake. But he, too, did not refuse to recollect the past. He made some cursory mention of his wife’s brothers having been his tenants in the farm; nay, he said with a smile in reference to his recent marriage, that the temporary arrangement had helped in bringing about what was for him a most fortunate as well as permanent result. His first introduction to his wife had arisen from it. Such trifling causes are, in some sort, the motive power in shaping out our destinies.

Listening to her husband’s flattering acknowledgment of the fortuitousness—for him—of her brothers’ short tenancy of Copley Grange Farm, Agneta smiled sweetly back upon him. Mr. Amyott was somewhat worn and still more languid in his middle age; a man to whose over-cultivated nature much of the life around him, with which his wife’s fresh youth had some instinctive sympathy, was rough, rude, boisterous, and oppressive, even when it was not offensive, so that the abiding expression of his aristocratic features was wistful and pensive, rather than resolute and hopeful: still he was a fine patrician-looking man, only a little past the prime of life, and a trifle the worse for the wear. He was gentle and elegant—according to the old standard of elegance, in his whole tone; a shade plaintive and fretful occasionally, but never morose or violent. He was deferential, almost to a fault, to the wishes of his wife, which he was well able to gratify, since he happened to be in the possession of an ample, unencumbered rent-roll, a charming place, so well-ordered an establishment that her stepchildren never came in their young stepmother’s way, but fell at once into the pleasantest and most desirable relations with her, and a position second to few in the county. From Agneta’s point of view, she had good cause to be satisfied with the marriage which had fulfilled the expectations of her guardians. Her education—whatever else it had stifled in her, had served to develop largely a reasonable prudence.

The Amyotts managed to make use of the fact of Oliver’s arrival that very afternoon, as an excuse for not waiting to receive the invitation to enter the Mill-house, which its master was in no haste to give, while both recognised that the omission on the first encounter served as an index of the extent of their future intercourse.

Left alone, Oliver acknowledged the happy couple were free from ulterior designs in invading his privacy. Apart from these, what was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? He had an idea that Harry and Horace Stanhope, with their baby, would settle down at a distance from Copley Grange, which would still farther simplify matters and smooth down awkwardnesses, so that in the future intercourse of the Manor-house and the Mill, Fan’s marriage, with its girlish aspirations, would soon be as though it had never been—and it was best so.

Oliver reached the carved gallery at last; and leant over the balustrade looking down on the water of the Brook and away over the woody undulating ground of Copley Grange Park, where the sombre green thorns were covered with dark crimson haws, and no note of a bird broke the stillness, which was only made alive by the monotonous babbling of the Brook. How vividly some of the more significant scenes of his life, since he attained manhood, rose before him there! The thorns were red and white again in flower, and the thrush was once more singing, as he broke to Fan his life-purpose, and combated her objections. How full of confidence he had been! With what high hopes and steadfast resolves he had entered on his mission, and it had come to nothing! He had been foiled on every side, till at last he was allowing himself to drift out of the struggle.

He was watching the ducks eating the mulberries, and turning his back, in vain, on a stalwart young figure cumbered with a limber attendant, belonging, by rights, to Oliver’s gone-by ’Varsity days, and yet starting up, stepping out there through the park, and hailing him on his threshold, in spite of him.

He was walking with Fan in her garden, listening to her unwonted chatter and warm admiration of these new friends.

The master baker was jostled, tripped up, and thrown down afresh by his late journeyman in the twilight lane yonder.

Oliver was cut dead anew by Catherine Hilliard in the High Street of Friarton.

The frost was on the ground while Harry Stanhope was besieging Oliver’s bedroom door to announce his intentions; and presently the brother was facing the sister on the hearthrug, holding her back from her fate.

Oliver was grasping Fan’s hands and pledging himself the devil should not have Harry. Oliver was binding himself to give up any grain which he might have gathered from the crop which had cost him so dear, that he might help her to lie on the bed which she had made for herself. Yet Harry’s deliverance had proved harder to effect than that of Tam Lane in the ballad. It had been beyond the power either of strong man or devoted woman, though it was just possible, after Fan’s dead hands dropped the task, it might be performed by baby fingers in God’s great way of nature.

Would Oliver, with his present knowledge, do all he had done over again, if the choice were once more given him? He thought it over deliberately and as calmly as he could, in trying to form his plans for the future, and he honestly believed he would. He solemnly thanked God for the boon of such a belief, to soften the soreness of his disappointment and defeat, and still the ache of his heart. The consciousness confirmed his faith that there had been some good in his aims. They had not owed their origin entirely to presumption and self-conceit. However rash and over-confident he might have been, however much he had bungled the whole business, he had the assurance of his conscience that the fault had not lain largely in his motives. Yes, he would if he could begin it all over again—to establish higher principles of trade—to make trade honourable, to fill hungry mouths with wholesome food; and he would still have granted Fan’s petition at all hazards. How did he know that he was to prove the pioneer of trade reformation, while he was well assured that he was his sister’s natural refuge and stay? He could not have made himself strange to his own flesh, with whom his first duty lay. He must have acknowledged the obligation for charity to begin at home.

Before the dusk prevented him, Oliver took out and re-read Harry Stanhope’s last letter. It was a little longer than the usual brief reports, which were hardly higher intellectual efforts than those of the young rustics whose vicar has seen that they have profited by a night-school. This was the ordinary style of Harry’s letters:—

‘Dear Constable,—Here goes. We are all well. Baby is thriving. She
has got her frocks shortened, and looks the better for it. It is
still awfully hot. We—Harry and me, for Mr. and Mrs. Weatherley don’t
try the dodge—took a header, and had a swim in the river for an hour
this morning. Woodhurst—that’s the man whose ground lies all about
here, is to let us have lots of fishing. I hope you’re all right.
‘Yours, &c.’

That was as nearly as possible the substance of the unclerkly scrawls which Harry sent. But to write at all, without compelling cause, was a great advance on the writer’s native inconsiderateness and freedom from any comprehension of responsibility.

In the letter which Oliver held in his hand, however, Harry, in his stumbling jerking manner, had contrived to say a good deal more.

The two Stanhopes had gone back with the Weatherleys, on the return of the clergyman and his wife to their country parish, and had found lodgings close to the vicarage where Mrs. Weatherley still had the baby in her kind care. It was the attraction of the baby—with the fear of doing it harm by removing it from the good offices of an experienced matron—which in the beginning drew Harry and his brother across the Channel, back to England, and down into the rural retirement of a remote parish. But it soon became plain that the Weatherleys—coming in contact with Harry Stanhope at a turning point in his life, getting him into their hands when his heart was wrung with suffering and his whole character subdued—had acquired a growing influence over the young man. He was rapidly adopting their forms of thought and turns of speech, and falling in, to some extent, with their habits and practices. He had always possessed in a sense a ductile disposition, apt to take the moulding of its surroundings and associations. But a great wrench had been required to separate a thoughtless young fellow from his low atmosphere—laden with earthly vapours and dense with worldliness, and to launch him into the higher, rarer air of altogether loftier principles and considerations, breathed by the Weatherleys. Harry had suffered such a wrench and received such an impetus as propels many men—especially many shallow, impulsive men—to the opposite poles of their former opinions and pursuits.

At this epoch of his history—when Harry Stanhope turned inevitably, with a sick heart, from his old interests; when all his former sports, though he still engaged in them mechanically, were flat and stale to him; when what was spiritual in his moral constitution craved spiritual consolation and refreshment—something beyond this world, some promise of reward and restoration for his lost love and its object, some reparation of all wrong, and enduring foundation for all good—Harry was carried out of the past in a totally new direction from any he had followed hitherto, where his brother would join him sooner or later.

Harry retained his simple cordiality, but the simplicity had got a new bias, and the cordiality a fresh outlet. In those letters—the occasional writing of which, without the inducement of borrowing money, was a marvel in itself—while he expressed himself scantily, there was also something of the transparent prattle though not the gush of a girl.

In the more recent prattle Oliver learnt a good deal of church services and parish work, in which, to his wonder at first, he found Harry was taking part. He had been practising with Mr. Weatherley’s choir, and doing a little rudimentary teaching in his schools, as well as helping Mrs. Weatherley with her parish children’s annual feast and the machinery of her different clubs.

Harry did not dream of making the slightest apology for those extraordinary occupations. He was as free from self-consciousness now as ever. He mentioned the schools and the festival as naturally and unaffectedly as if he had been referring to a cricket-match and the dinner which followed. That struck Oliver as the most hopeful symptom in the case, and he was as devoutly glad as the Weatherleys could have wished.

But Oliver’s gladness received a sudden check when he found Harry writing humbly enough, to be sure, of his unfitness for reading for orders, as Mr. Weatherley had just been suggesting he might do.

‘Good heavens, I should think not!’ assented Oliver in a great heat. ‘I am glad Harry retains one iota of common sense, if Weatherley is so far out of his mind. Now, even supposing Harry has outlived his lamentable propensity—supposing he were to pass muster, I should have to interfere and speak to the bishop.’

But poor Harry was not really thinking of anything so far beyond him. He was only modestly preluding the statement that he had been with Mr. Weatherley when he was delivering some of his cottage addresses, and Harry had been moved and helped to say a word of warning from his own experience.

Was Harry in the way of being taught to go about and speak at such meetings? Had he, too, turned social reformer and preacher—in the last particular, as Oliver was free to admit, shrugging his shoulders, far outstripping his, Oliver’s, performances? Would Harry’s inveterate fancy for joining in whatever was going on, his incorrigible good-fellowship, thenceforth, or even for a time, take the shape of lay aid in priestly ministrations, pointing Mr. Weatherley’s morals by a word in season from a sinner who was a standing commentary on the vicar’s text—at once a warning and an example, a young man who was ready to proclaim himself an evildoer formerly, one who had known both the temptation and the penalty, but had escaped with the skin of his teeth? Would Harry, if he continued in well-doing, go on exposing his shortcomings, steeling himself in the exposure, till he should come to Fan’s wrongs? Would he regard it as an act of expiation, and an offering for the good of his fellow-men, to speak out thus, and when his little daughter was old enough to listen to his words and understand them, would he still tell his piteous tale, and humble himself in her hearing—it might be in the hearing of some other evangelist’s daughter or sister, who might have replaced Fan and become Harry’s second wife, and the mother of his children?

Oliver writhed at the mere notion. He recalled Fan’s strong, proud reserve in the middle of her ardour, her delicate reticence, her unconquerable shrinking from common speculation and coarse comment. Were the sacred secrets of her death-bed to be bruited about and made food for vulgar curiosity by this new kind of weak excess in the man who had inflicted the agony?

Then Oliver called himself back. Had he any right to sit in stern judgment on Harry Stanhope’s weakness, granted that it was weakness even to self-indulgence? What if this were the sole refuge for Harry Stanhope, the only means by which the man whom Fan had so loved and striven to win, could be won to virtue and temperance? What if this were the single method by which Harry could serve his fellow-creatures? There are dull or besotted scholars who can receive no teaching save from homely, broad personalities, and there are primitive teachers who if they are not personal are nothing. Such teaching might appear little better than foolish and despicable to Oliver Constable, and yet what assurance had he, in his arrogance and self-sufficiency, that it was not among the foolish things which God has chosen to confound the wise? Might not Fan, from her peace among the angels, regard these ebullitions—which were at least frank and guileless—that vexed Oliver’s soul, in an altogether different light from that in which she would have seen them, had she been still living an erring woman on earth?

No; let poor Harry do what seemed good unto him. God forbid that Oliver should put hindrances in Harry’s path—the path which was, perhaps, best suited for his stumbling feet.