OLIVER CONSTABLE VOL. I.

OLIVER CONSTABLE MILLER AND BAKER BY SARAH TYTLER AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1880 [All rights reserved]

TO MARGARET

MOTHER AND SISTER IN ONE: LOVING AND FAITHFUL FELLOW-WORKER WHOSE EAGER INTEREST IN THIS STORY PROVED ITS AUTHOR’S GREATEST ENCOURAGEMENT IN WRITING IT: WHOSE DEATH BEFORE THE STORY WAS FINISHED DARKENED LIFE AND WORK TO ONE SOLITARY WORKER IN HOPE OF THE TIMES OF RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS Oxford: 17th April 1880

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

[Pg 1]

OLIVER CONSTABLE, MILLER AND BAKER.

CHAPTER I. FRIARTON MILL.

Old mills which were built to be worked by water power are mostly picturesque objects in the landscape. They command without fail certain advantages of situation. Certainly they are not likely to possess extensive views, where they stand in the low lands which claim a fall of water. But water is their specialty, and where there is water, there is generally wood. My readers must call up without any difficulty [Pg 2]before their minds’ eyes pleasant pictures of such mills with their placid dams and flashing weirs, their great mill wheels and their noisy clappers, their dusty sacks and their equally dusty millers, so proverbial for their white coats as to have lent a popular name to one pollen sprinkled auriculus. Mill and water, wheel and man, are all set in a green leafy nook which forms the broadest possible contrast to the grey bare downs on which the windmill extends its giant arms and swings its flapping sails. Picture and song have enshrined the old water mills from the days when Constable the painter loved to represent on canvas such a Suffolk mill as that which was familiar

to his youth, to the later days when Tennyson wrote his idyll of the Miller’s Daughter.

Of all mills which had their sites chosen with reference to water, though the millers—not anticipating Mr. Ruskin’s objections—had long before the present day, by the help of [Pg 3]machinery, set seasons of drought at defiance, none was more thoroughly picturesque in its own line of picturesqueness, pleasanter to all the senses, more homelike, restful and sweet, like a thrush’s nest or a tuft of primroses, than Friarton Mill in Holmshire. It was so evidently agreeable to the eye, and had attained to such an amount of fame for this desirable quality, that it had been suffered to remain where it had been built in primitive easy-going times, within a stone’s throw of the park of Copley Grange, and in full view of the manor-house. In fact it had been found that, after the fashion of those happy accidents which create leaning towers and whispering galleries, and which can never be copied with any certainty of success, the indifference to æsthetics which had made the old squire of Copley Grange permit the miller of his day

to erect his mill at his liege lord’s elbow, had been oddly enough rewarded by furnishing the Squire’s descendants [Pg 4]or successors with one of the choicest bits of what we may call landscape vertu—a home lion which, as the modern squires were not needy men, and had further acquired the modern culture of beauty to their finger tips, they would not have lacked for a good many broad acres. If the reigning miller and owner of Friarton Mill had been Vandal enough to propose to demolish it—which he could have done since his fathers had bought it and certain pasture fields of the original suzerain—he would have awakened the liveliest consternation in the breasts of his social superiors.

The loss of Friarton Mill would have gone far to destroy the picturesque charm of Copley Grange, with all its advantages of wood and water. For, to the deep regret of its youngest sons and daughters, their ancestor under the second George had taken it upon him with no consideration for the tastes and feelings of [Pg 5]his great-great-grandchildren to pull down a gem of a rambling, inconvenient, half-ruinous Elizabethan manor-house. And he had replaced it with a distressingly heavy, square pile of masonry, in which he and the architect had actually thought of little save of expressing pompously their ideas of space and comfort. The little which went beyond these prosaic requirements had borne the doubtful fruit of an Italian portico. It had been voted elegant and classical by the contemporaries of the unfortunate squire who was thus severely reflected upon by his heirs. In a few more years it might rise again into value. It might be prized as a proof of past style, of the tendency of the day, serving as a key to the prevalence of fiddle brown

in artists’ work, and to the choice of subjects in Richard Wilson’s paintings, or as an indication of something else equally interesting. But in the present day, with which after all this generation has most [Pg 6]to do, it was regarded as an incongruous humbug.

The living representative of the family at Copley Grange had done what he could to remedy the fatal error of his ancestor. He had succeeded, when he came of age, to the savings of a long minority. He was also the manager in chief of a large endowment which a pious and charitable predecessor had bequeathed to support a Copley Grange row of almshouses. By a most fortuitous circumstance, if not by a clear interposition of Providence, as the young Squire was disposed to think, this endowment had been legally disputed, and had remained in abeyance till the lawyers picked as much flesh as they could off its bones, so that the rearing of the fabric, which was to be emblematic to all time, fell to a nineteenth-century man. He improved the circumstance. Instead of building a set of ordinary red brick cottages with little cottage kailyards, which might have fitly [Pg 7]housed and afforded recreation to twenty old Copley Grange labourers and their aged partners, he let in a little light on the crass ignorance of the destroyer of the Elizabethan

manor-house, by building in the immediate vicinity of Copley Grange a terrace of dainty little structures, all gables and mullioned windows, and stacks of chimneys—with pleasure-grounds having thickets and lawns to correspond, which took several experienced gardeners, told off for the purpose, to keep them in order. Finally he built a tiny alms-house chapel on the strictest principles of mediæval architecture. The carving within and without, the painted glass, the frescoes, the Latin texts which might have been Greek or Hebrew to the daily worshippers, the peal of bells, supplied a boast to the county guide-book.

It is another question whether the poor old bodies, whose number was now limited to eight, and whose taste could hardly be supposed to [Pg 8]have reached the stage at which that unlucky forefather of the Squire’s had committed his solecism, did not feel far from home, aggrieved, and made mountebanks of in their new quarters. The arrangements, which included endless draughty corners, and troublesome, perilous steps up and steps down, were purely perplexing and affronting to the occupants of the almshouses. These pensioners were taken out of ugly houses on a level with their capacities, and therefore more to their minds. The old men and women, too old to learn, were elected according to the reigning Squire and his wife’s will and pleasure, and somewhat with reference to the worn out labourers’ venerable beards and their wives’ smooth silver braids of hair, or to the couples’ reasonable disposition to avail themselves of blackthorn sticks and silver-rimmed spectacles, as well as to their general good behaviour, and what might be reckoned upon in

the matter of their punctual and decorous [Pg 9]attendance at the chaplain’s daily services.

Naturally, perhaps, the recipients of the Squire’s bounty were not particularly grateful for the manner of its bestowal. They were too practical and hard pressed to refuse a refuge which after all was far before the poor-house. But old Mrs. Scud expressed boldly the secret sentiments of six out of the eight women when she declared she ‘wished Squire’s lady would try a day’s washing herself, and see if she would like it, in a nasty cold common wash-house which anybody might halve and quarter, and who wanted that imperent, pushing Mrs. Webb, or sly Anne Sole, to come in and take a invitory of their old men’s wussen shirts, and their own darnedest stockings, when they had been accustomed to wash nice and comfortable in private on their own warm hearth-stone where nobody could come and spy, without the missus of the house’s leave? Ah! she were missus of [Pg 10]her house in them days, and not bound to say her prayers at the gentlefolks’ pleasure. What good could that do to her poor old soul, she would like to know? It “might lend a

lift” to her betters’ souls, since they were always in luck, but forced prayers never did no good to them as said them, that she would take her Bible oath on.’

And old Mr. Fry (the members of the stranded colony were each strictly Mr. and Mrs. among themselves, unless in the case of a miserable spinster who had missed her mark, like Anne Sole) daringly defined the opinions of his brethren when he protested he would give all ‘them fandangles of shrubberies and grass that were of no good save to the screeching birds of the air as he was not allowed to put a finger on, for his old cabbage bed, where, as everybody knew, he had riz the whitest-hearted cabbages in the parish, not to say for his pig-stye, where, when he could do a double day’s [Pg 11]work, and was well-to-do—never thinking what he would come to—as some there could bear him witness, he had fed prime pigs as were a pleasure to look at.

So it became another question whether the owner of Copley Grange had altogether fulfilled the intention—always supposing it to have been kindly and not ostentatious or selfish in disguise—of his forerunner, as he was fully persuaded he had done, while he fumed over the thanklessness and discontent of the poor, or whether he had served himself and ridden his hobby to the death, by way of loving his neighbour.

When all was done, the Copley Grange Almshouses were only a modern antique, and the Squire had too much taste not to prefer the real antique of Friarton Mill, which was not his property, indeed, but was set down within a stone’s throw of his grounds. As he took care to keep on the best terms with the miller, the Squire flattered himself, it was as safe almost, [Pg 12]as though it were in his own hands. He was at liberty to take his guests over it at all hours, in the course of the shortest of strolls, and he had so managed a vista of old thorn trees that the mill formed the loveliest vignette from the grand drawing-room windows.

There was no inscription on the building, and there is no existing architecture which could decide the date when Friarton Mill was built. Popular tradition, which always tends to the age of good Queen Bess, as if it had been golden and not iron in English annals, loosely attributed that date to the mill. Undoubtedly, it was so old that even its unsophisticated millers had grown proud and careful of its age, as a man who will ignore and trample upon his years at sixty, nay, at threescore and ten, will boast of them, and cherish them tenderly from eighty upwards. Everything about the mill, except the iron machinery which was kept out of sight, was white powdered or silvery grey, or [Pg 13]rich brown, or toned in sage or olive green, dull crimson, and dusky orange by stonecrops and lichens, as no art-school design could tone colours. The building stood as near the water as an old Venetian palace is to its canal. The site must have been untenable in an English climate to any miller who was not proof against the chest complaints

and rheumatisms that English flesh is heir to, had not the water which in floods lapped the mill walls been the flow just below the weir. It was always rapid in its current, thus carrying off a large proportion of its own vapour, never stagnated in pools, nor, even when there was least water, dried up in portions of its channel, throwing off unwholesome miasma in the process. Another protection to the miller and his family was, that his two-storied, stone-roofed, dwelling house, built at right angles to the mill, stood by the whole breadth of its court back from the water where the ground rose, and a natural drainage filtered [Pg 14]away the damp in the soil. Actual evidence removed all reproach of slimy or mildewed unwholesomeness from Friarton Mill, or, for that matter, from the mansion-house of Copley Grange, which stood only a little farther from what was still called ‘the Brook,’ or ‘Buller’s Brook.’ No races of men or women in the parish had been, in the memory of the oldest Friarton man (and he was to be found in the

Copley Grange Almshouses), stronger and longer-lived, in the main, than the two families which had for generations dwelt in the mill and the manor-house.

On the face of the mill, as it fronted the water, opening from the second story, was a curiously carved wooden gallery, such as one meets with in Nüremberg and some of the older German towns. It had been intended originally to hold sacks of corn or flour, which were hoisted up or lowered down by a crane from, or to, the narrow road-way—only broad enough [Pg 15]at the widest to hold a single farm cart with its horses—that interposed between the mill and the water. The gallery had become obsolete for this purpose, having been superseded by other and ampler contrivances on the other side of the mill; and a great willow tree had been allowed to grow up and still farther impede the road-way, which it narrowed to a footpath, as it spread out its roots, and flung across its higher branches until they drooped over the water. But the respect which had been developed for every sign of the mill’s antiquity not only saved the gallery from destruction, but, in order to keep up its character, caused it to be occasionally used still, as a place of

deposit for floury sacks. It was more frequently employed as a point of vantage which the miller could appropriate—a place for smoking his pipe and staring at the water beneath his feet; where the gentle folks from Copley could come and loiter and gaze [Pg 16]abroad into the recesses of Copley Grange Park, which was only divided from the mill by the Brook and a sunk fence.

The park was by no means large, but the ground was undulating, and, furnished with patches of bracken, old thorns, brakes of hazel and blackberry, and some magnificent oaks and beeches, it formed of itself dells and dingles, which had the appearance of stretching far and wide.

At two seasons of the year the view from the gallery of Friarton Mill which did not extend beyond the park, and had the objection, if you will, of being shut in, ‘tame and domestic,’ formed at the same time a nearly perfect bit of woodland, while the well ‘seasoned’ Georgian house, with the Italian façade in the foreground, stopped short of being an eyesore. In late spring, when the tender green of the beech and oak contrasted with the sombre green of the fir, and was relieved by the [Pg 17]white blossoms of the wild crab and pear trees; when the gnarled hawthorn bushes, in the dim light of early morning or late twilight, stood crowned like ‘aged men,’ or in the glory of noon bent like veiled brides; when clusters of red May and the spikes of the red-flowered chestnut—introduced to compete with the native trees—lent a half tropical brilliance to the sweet English purity of the colouring; when the turf below was here and there pale gold with primroses or misty blue with hyacinths; when blackbirds and thrushes

sang openly and unblushingly to their mates on every spray, and the cuckoo’s note and the ringdove’s call sounded from hidden hollows; when the first nightingale made night tuneful and poured out his passion till it rose in liquid clearness above the monotonous rush and tinkle of the waters, then Copley Grange Park, and Friarton Mill were at their second best. For the autumn suited them even better than the spring, nothing [Pg 18]could surpass the exquisite rich mellowness and tender delicacy when the ripe brown chestnut was dropping from its husk on the water-of-Nile coloured grass, in the chillness of October; when the five fingers of the chestnut leaves and the vine leaf of the maple were burning in maize colour; when the oak was russet, the beech and wild cherry crimson darkening into purple or streaked with scarlet; the birch and the elm straw and daffodil colour; when the bracken was rusty; when only the trill of the robin and the distant bark of a dog broke the stillness of the earth resting from its labours with a curtain of haze falling between it and the dappled sky.

But in winter also, when Buller’s Brook was hanging with icicles, and ‘roaring and reaming’ after it had broken its frozen bounds, and the grass was sere, and the boughs of the trees stood out bare and black, unless where the sunlight caught those near at hand, and brought out their furry greys, and the blue [Pg 19]bloom of a plum, hovering about the twigs and bourgeons; or when they were feathered with hoar frost or panoplied with snow, standing out in dead cold masses against the leaden grey of the clouds—the park, as seen from the mill gallery, was not to be despised by any hardy sight-seer who could face with fortitude benumbed toes and tingling fingers.

The court before the mill-house had its own tree, a round-headed bushy mulberry tree, while the house itself was covered with several old-fashioned rose bushes, including a monthly rose which did not wait for June, but sent out its china pink buds early in May, and went on obligingly, supplying large instalments of various shades of magenta-coloured, faintly smelling roses, from month to month, till November, if the winter were not a hard one. The other roses, noisette and a crimson—acquiring a duller purple tinge, perhaps the nearest approach to ‘blue roses’ in fading—adhered [Pg 20]strictly to June and July for flowering in one blow, but they made up as much as possible for their unbending character in this respect by pouring forth, when they did blossom, a prodigal wealth of roses, which in their turn discharged a perfect avalanche of crumbled petals into the court and on the breast of the brook, that ran, for days at a time, pied like a daisy, impartially divided into the colours of York and Lancaster, as other rivers have run yellow with gold or red with blood. One side

of the house would show sumptuous crimson without a green leaf for a whole fortnight, when it was not a rainy summer; and as for the ivory white noisette roses, the half-blown buds and flowers on a branch could be counted by the fifty, and a single cluster would fill one of Fan Constable’s crazy, tottering flower-glasses.

At one time the older of these rose trees, with the ‘mulberry-bush,’ as it was called, had served for a flower-garden to the mill-house, as [Pg 21]the bough of a tree or a few stones on the stage used to stand for a forest or a rocky pass. Then the dwellers in the mill-house became less primitive in their notions, and not so easily satisfied. The miller’s wife had her border round her court with daffodils and carnations, sweet-williams and sunflowers in their order, until at last the border merged into a walled garden, which, in addition to its apricot-trees and its early peas and potatoes, had its dahlia and salvia beds, and its frames for raising geraniums and verbenas, all of them not so far behind the terraces and green-houses at Copley Grange.