Chapter XXV: ‘the Devil Shall Not Have Harry.’

The three years allotted by his brother-farmers for Harry Stanhope to run through what small patrimony he had invested in Copley Grange Farm, and what credit he had begun upon, did their work more effectually than the months given by Oliver Constable for Harry to tire of his part as a yeoman.

Fan had held her husband back with a little hand which was like a vice for staunchness, but which had, at last, loosened its grip under overwhelming pressure.

Horace had thrown his passive dead weight in the way, to impede Harry’s swift progress to ruin.

Oliver Constable had not stood aside in sulky neutrality, or hard inflexibility flavoured with vindictiveness, to witness the fulfilment of his predictions. He would have given much for them to prove false. He did all he could to prevent their realisation. He had little in common with his brother-in-law, and it was in the characters of the two men to grow always more apart instead of nearer to each other. Still Oliver, though he was not much in Harry Stanhope’s company, and though Harry showed himself constantly more restive, under any influence which Oliver had ever possessed over him, tried his best in the thankless office of looking after Harry, when he was beyond his wife’s scope, and of interposing to save him—not merely from the consequences of his own folly, but from falling a victim to his neighbours’ weaknesses. As a result of this knight-errantry on Oliver’s part, there was an entire rupture between him and Jack Dadd on Harry’s account.

Harry Stanhope’s incapacity for drawing distinctions—moral as well as social—his vanity and passion for popularity, had all pointed with tolerable clearness to one conclusion from the first. He had no notion of what was expedient. He was not particular in his easygoing fashion. He was bound to turn soon from his self-imposed obligations, selected very much at haphazard, and sitting with the greatest lightness upon him. He must have excitement of some kind, at any cost.

The upper, and, to be fair, the more decorous, set in Friarton, which had commenced by being delighted with their opposite in Harry Stanhope’s _abandon_, matched as it was with his gentle birth and breeding, ceased to prize his company when they found it was bestowed on their social inferiors with a thousand times the lavishness and indiscriminateness which they had severely censured in Oliver Constable. And all the time Oliver had claimed a right to act as he did, and asserted a principle in it, while he had shown a method in his madness. In the course of the last three years, he had brought his accusers to acknowledge that, though he had lost himself in the matter of his money, talents, and education, with the desirable position which they might have commanded, he was not a reprobate, and he had known when to stop long before the climax of individual degradation.

As Harry Stanhope ceased to be the idol of the gentlemen and ladies, he became also less of the pet and more of the butt of the lower grade into which he was increasingly thrown. The young farmers and tradesmen with whom he fraternised, not only at market and in cricket-matches and games of bowls, but on every occasion, public and private, still looked up to him in many things, and copied him—not always to their benefit, but a stronger tincture of contempt was getting infused into their liking.

This was especially true of Jack Dadd, who, while he continued proud of being hand-in-glove with Harry Stanhope, did not scruple to make a cat’s-paw of his friend, and rather enjoyed leading him into a scrape and leaving him there. This disloyalty and shade of baseness did not spring necessarily from Jack’s class or calling, and they had still less to do with his natural good temper. They belonged to long-standing class feuds and the lingering spite thus engendered. It was almost inevitably wreaked on a person who, however ready to forget social prejudices, sprang still from the privileged order.

Oliver humbled himself in the room of Harry Stanhope, and through Harry in the place of Fan, to remonstrate with Jack Dadd.

‘You are older than Stanhope, Jack,’ Oliver reminded his quondam friend, who had bragged earlier of their friendship, ‘and you were not brought up in the very odour of thoughtlessness.’

‘So I suppose I ain’t fit to go about with your gentleman brother-in-law, unless as his keeper. “Not if I know it;” “Not for Joe,”’ interrupted Jack, rudely and flippantly. ‘I ain’t so fond of being a fellow’s keeper, as you are, Constable, though you don’t seem to like to try it on Harry Stanhope. I thought you had got a lesson and rid yourself of such priggishness, long ago. It ain’t a compliment to Stanhope to make out he’s not fit to take care of hisself, or to choose his company and be on equal terms with them. Lord! it was a funny sort of equality last night when I cut my stick, just as he was challenging the stableman at the “Wheat Ears” to box with him, Dummy being to hold their jackets, I take it. Stanhope ain’t proud; I’ll say that for him, neither when he’s as tight as a lord, nor when he’s as sober as a judge—which don’t often happen now-a-days. It comes to this, Constable, I’ve had enough of your sauce of dictation. There was not so much difference between that and your sister’s airs, and a fine pass they’ve brought her to: got her a gentleman for a husband, no doubt—and, what is more, he’s worth the two of you; but he’s made her work for him so as keeping a shop would have been a joke by comparison, and he’ll kick the causeway all the same.’

After that conversation there was an end to friendly intercourse between Oliver and Jack, and to any fond hope which the former had once been so conceited as to entertain, of swaying his brother-tradesman to higher aims.

Harry Stanhope’s deterioration in every respect included his inveterate idleness in all pursuits which did not take the form of sport or frolic, while ploughing, sowing, cattle-feeding, even hay-making and reaping, when they ceased to be novelties, ceased also to be sport or frolic, lost every element of interest and amusement, and became positively repugnant to the man who remained always a boy. He neglected his farming utterly, or made wild havoc with it in his fitful, reckless operations, forced sales, and consequent desperate losses.

With all this wanton waste Fan had nothing to do. She had accomplished wonders in the _rôle_ she had undertaken. Her dairy produce and poultry were from the first among the best in the neighbourhood. She competed successfully with those farmers’ wives who were either nothing save dairymaids and henwives, or who employed experienced servants to do their mistresses’ work by proxy. Any prizes which agricultural societies awarded to the tenants of Copley Grange Farm were for its mistress’s butter and cheese, goslings and turkey poults.

And all the time Fan was not a dairymaid alone, she was a gentleman’s wife deserving of the name. In order to unite the contrasting attributes, she rose up early and lay down late, and ate the bread of carefulness. She changed her dress as often as any fine lady who has nothing to do, no occupation or pleasure in life save dressing herself by the help of a maid. Fan was rewarded when Harry noticed the freshness of her calicot morning gown, the daintiness of her afternoon piqué, the good taste of her evening grenadine.

Neither Harry nor Horace had an idea of gardening beyond sticking a spade into the ground once in the course of the spring and leaving it there after a quarter of an hour, or gathering an occasional handful of strawberries, while the cook demanded a regular supply of vegetables, and the masters missed seasonable fruit when it was not forthcoming, appearing to expect cherries, peaches, and pears to drop from the skies like manna. Fan read garden chronicles alternately with dairy manuals, and spent many a fatiguing hour of her early married life striving to direct the labours of an improvised gardener drawn from the ranks of the field workers. It was as much out of the question for Harry to keep a skilled gardener as it was for Fan to set up a qualified housekeeper and an experienced dairymaid, though Harry would have attempted it without a doubt if he had been suffered. But Fan stinted herself of all other worthy assistants, because a good cook and a trained table-boy who could cater for the two young men and wait upon them as they had been used to be waited upon, became absolutely necessary to the Stanhopes, as soon as their establishment at Copley Grange Farm acquired a settled character, and ceased to partake of the nature of living for a time _al fresco_, or _in villeggiatura_.

When Fan became painfully conscious that she had not only her own arduous double and treble duties to attend to, she must also supply deficiencies on Harry’s part, she rose to the occasion gallantly. She added agricultural journals, treatises on husbandry, essays on farm stock, to her other diligent studies. She crammed herself; she sought to coach Harry. She tired herself to death and exposed herself to innumerable catarrhs and coughs wandering over the fields in all kinds of weather, to win him, by her close sympathetic companionship, to go among his men, or else to show them, in his interest, that there was the eye of a mistress, if not a master, on their work. She drove with Harry and Horace to the markets, and if it had not been to spare Harry’s dignity as a yeoman and his credit as a man—since poor Fan had a double object and a double terror in accompanying her husband to the towns—she would willingly have stood with him in the streets and the corn exchanges and sat with him at the inn tables. And if Fan could have been ten women instead of one, she might have saved Harry Stanhope from worldly destruction, as Mrs. Polley had rescued her husband and children. The two women did not resemble each other much in other respects, and there was little love lost between them. But they shared at least the helpfulness, command of resources, and capacity for brave effort and endurance, of the women of the trading classes—the women who have not been spoilt, and have not lost the instincts of energy and enterprise, and with it the most distant resemblance to the virtuous woman in Proverbs. This was part of Fan’s inheritance as a tradesman’s daughter, which she had neither guessed nor valued as it deserved.

It is a fact established by experience that many women, both widows and spinsters, have made, when the opportunities offered themselves, good and successful farmers. Fan was a clever woman apart from book-learning; she was a woman of strong resolution, and she was stimulated and braced by every motive which she held dear. If a single mortal woman could have redeemed Harry Stanhope’s fortunes, she would have redeemed them.

But the one woman must certainly have been ten, and Fan could not multiply her identity or render herself ubiquitous. She was tremendously overweighted—not only by the whole burden and anxiety of the farm’s being cast upon her, who ought to have been treated as the weaker vessel, but by the unnerving, despairing suspicion—deepening every day into hopeless conviction, that an impending wreck of other than worldly goods was to be faced and wrestled with. Harry was—in what became always more imminent and hideous danger—of being as speedily and utterly swamped in tastes, opinions, habits—all that constitute moral character, as in income and capital. In the dread and horror of that final downfall, all other falls began to look light.

Fan ceased to pay the smallest heed to the fact that still there came no recognition of her entrance into the Stanhope family save from pretty, temporising, meaningless letters written by Agneta. The other members coolly ignored the intruder. Mrs. Harry Stanhope had no concern to spare for the consciousness that the little household at Copley Grange Farm were not keeping their first footing, which had seemed to be their birthright, among the upper ten of Friarton.

She did not even mind that the Polleys and Dadds grew loud in amazed pity—in which, at the same time, she believed they revelled, over her altered circumstances. Mrs. Harry Stanhope was not only reduced to sending butter, cheese and eggs into the town for sale, she came herself to the Polleys’ shop and the cheese shop, to square the accounts which no one else at the farm could make out. Everybody knew Harry Stanhope had turned out a gentle beggar and purely ornamental. He could not afford to keep a bailiff to give the orders for which he was so little prepared that his men continually laughed in their sleeves at the instructions they received. The mistress of Copley Grange Farm commanded no more help than she could get from a girl under twenty in addition to the dairyman to manage the dairy and poultry-yard, on which it was evident the principal dependence of the farmer must rest. And did not the old Fan Constable look worn and pulled down, though she might be proud and ‘game’ to the last, as Mrs. Harry Stanhope? The truth was that when Fan was from home or in society without Harry, her eyes had already acquired the fixed, abstracted look of eyes which are looking beyond their present surroundings, and seeing in the distance things invisible to her companions. Her ears were constantly on the alert, strained to catch sounds inaudible to the rest of the party. While she was taking her share in the conversation or the business going on about her, there was a perpetual undercurrent of thought and care in her mind which had no reference to the topics discussed. She had great self-command, so that she could preserve a double consciousness, but she was never at ease, never without trouble; and the unresting worry beneath the calm and smiling surface, showed itself in a haggard, aging look which was rapidly robbing Fan of all traces of her youth.

One evening in spring, when the thrushes and blackbirds were anticipating the nightingales and tuning their ’prentice notes in the hedges—which had gained the purplish-red bloom, the herald of a flush of green—over the primroses looking pale and cold in the raw wind of the March twilight, after the golden shields of the celandines, which had kept their neighbours company with quite an exuberance of jollity in the morning sunshine, had collapsed, as early as the afternoon, into small tightly wrapped-up balls, encased in dim green envelopes, Oliver was startled by Fan’s walking like a ghost unexpected, unannounced, and all alone, into the mill-house parlour.

It was too early in the season for evening strolls, and lately Fan had never been seen abroad without her husband. The same could not be said of Harry, who was often enough from home without his wife, and not quite so frequently, but still with tolerably constant recurrence during the winter, without his brother, whom he had learnt at last to shake off imperiously. There had come to be an unnatural divorce between light and shade, and day and night, neither faring well in the separation. For Harry, all by himself, drove his chariot of the sun, like another Phaëton, madly, and if he did not set the world on fire, his own eyes grew scorched and bloodshot, his lips parched, his hands palsied; the whole goodly springs of his manliness and kindliness were dried up and polluted with ashes, because of the burden of consuming fire he had laid hold of and would thenceforth try in vain to guide and control.

As for Horace, he would slink away like a dog summarily dismissed by his master, withdraw into his corner to sit moodily there, and only start up on the distant sound of Harry’s clogged instead of winged footsteps. Oliver had seen Horace and Fan exchange furtive, miserable glances when Horace returned thus alone, and drew back into the greatest gloom which the little drawing-room afforded him. Then the pair would sedulously pretend to read and work while in reality their ears were on the stretch, and their hearts on the rack, till far on into the night. These two knew and trusted each other thoroughly by this time, though Oliver was certain the looks never passed into words. Wife and brother remained too loyal in their allegiance.

As Oliver rose hastily to bid Fan welcome, he saw more plainly than he had yet seen it, and with a sharp pang at the sight, the change in her looks. A small woman to begin with, she was now little more than skin and bone. Her brown eyes appeared a sombre black, set in great shadowy hollows in her white face. The straight firm line of her lips was drooping and quivering. She put her thin hand in Oliver’s and held up her face to be kissed, and spoke without any preamble. ‘I am beaten, Oliver. They say an Englishman never knows when he is beaten, but that is a man, not a woman. Yet did you ever think I would give in with life? and I have given in. I have come to you, not to save me—you tried that once and failed. What did it matter if I might have saved another? only I have not—there’s the rub. I don’t mind myself, and you need not mind me. But you must do something. I tell you, Oliver, you must move heaven and earth to save Harry.’ Her voice rose into a little weak cry. She was like a creature who had lost all command over herself.

But it was not so much this reversal of natural law in a woman—by organisation and courage, self-sufficing, self-restrained, rational and resolute—which smote Oliver Constable with dismay and compunction, as if he had been the sinner whose sin was at the bottom of this spectacle, the most pitiable he had ever beheld. It was some comprehension of what Fan must have suffered, of what it had cost this woman—ardent and steadfast as women even more than men can prove themselves—to own herself beaten, to grovel as it were at his knees, and fling herself for help on him of all men, who, though he had been a brother in more than name, had interposed with all his might, without effect, as both of them were well aware, to turn her from the step which had brought her to this pass.

He remembered having, more than once in their lives, angrily accused her of being incapable of changing her mind; and—knowing as he had seemed to know her high spirit, unquenchable energy, and unswerving determination—he had been tempted to believe, against right reason, that however mistaken and misplaced her aspirations, or foolish and baseless her dreams, Fan could not be baffled, and would not be vanquished.

The end of all was, that she was more thoroughly subdued, presenting a more deplorable object of contemplation, than if she had been a far feebler woman.

‘My God!’ cried Oliver in his heart—moved as he was to its depths when a believing man can but appeal to the Father of his spirit; ‘what must she not have borne to crush her whole being, lay her pride in the dust, extinguish the last spark of hope, and break her heart?’

The next moment Oliver was briskly administering to Fan, as most people in his position, at their wits’ end what to do for the best, would have administered it, a cold douche—first on the suppliant, whom he would fain have taken into his arms and sheltered from every farther blast of the stormy wind which had cast her down bleeding and powerless, to implore mercy for another and not herself—and next on her agonised petition.

‘Nonsense, Fan, you are over-wrought, my dear; your nerves are unstrung; you do not know what you are saying.’

But the time for pulling herself together, struggling to her feet, and staggering on with the veil drawn decently down again over her torture and her faintness, was over for Fan. ‘I do know what I am saying, Oliver,’ she insisted with ashy lips, while the hand which clutched his arm was trembling like a leaf. ‘You think a wife should not drop the slightest hint of the skeleton in her closet. I will agree with you here. And I have not breathed a word to any other human being—not to Horry, who is his second self—only to you; and do you suppose I could have spoken to you unless in the last extremity, which has come?’

‘Then rest satisfied with what you have done, Fan; say no more about it,’ Oliver conjured her, as if he would have put his hand upon her mouth to keep her from further utterance, or brought down the creeping dusk to hide their faces from each other. He got up, took several turns up and down the room, so that he might have his back to her when he promised solemnly; ‘The devil shall not have Harry, so far as I can help it.’

That Fan should have come to her brother with such a prayer on her lips, was only less bad for him than for Fan herself.

Oliver Constable had not the most distant thought that Harry Stanhope could have grossly ill-treated his wife. Oliver would as soon have suspected Harry of lifting up his strong right arm to strike down Horace unresisting under the pacific influence of his devotion. It is your poor half-brutal coal-heaver who ordinarily adds kicks to curses, where his wife is concerned. As a rule, though certainly not without exceptions, centuries of refining civilisation and liberal education remove Harry’s whole class from committing such outrages. Harry Stanhope, with his graciousness in an entirely muddled condition, might challenge a muscular ostler to a round in the noble art of self-defence. He was known to have taken the law into his own hands and knocked down a ruffian who was belabouring a child and insulting an old woman. But he had probably hardly ever spoken a rough word to Fan, whom he had held in the greatest respect ever since he had known her, though she had become powerless to make a man of him, as he had proposed. She was not silly, or bumptious, or trying in any way so as to provoke the wrath which had originally been a rare experience with Harry. But not the less he had slain her faith in him, by his hopeless levity and folly, which were tending unmistakably to animal indulgence and besotted excess. He had not destroyed one atom of her love—else Fan’s heart too might have died within her in its cold emptiness, but, at least, it would not have been wrung with the intolerable pang of loving him to death and beyond death, yet seeing him go down, in spite of her, to the place of dragons.

There are students of humanity who positively state that a good man or woman’s love must inevitably perish with the loss of esteem. If so, the best human love must be singularly unlike Divine love as it is revealed to us. And it is one thing voluntarily to give love to a creature whose repulsive moral disease is evident and undeniable, and has already penetrated and poisoned the nature through and through—and quite another to have loved the same creature in the beauty and glory of sound mortal health, with but the seeds of fatal disease, only to be detected by the wise physician, lurking in the system, and having once loved to turn with loathing abhorrence and absolute rejection, from the sick man, when his weakness has found him out, his sore ancestral malady has laid fast hold of him, and he is fighting a desperate battle for life or death.

Not only did Fan’s love cling to Harry in his social and moral decline still more closely than when she had learned to love him in the heyday of his natural gifts; even Oliver—who had early taken Harry for what he was worth, and condemned him to his destiny, now in the teeth of what he had done to Fan, felt the man’s heart within him turn and soften with yearning and commiseration for the stripling who was so unequally matched, and was standing foot to foot, reeling under the shocks inflicted by a giant adversary and ghastly foe.

Oliver needed this compensation of human tenderness revived and called forth in the heart of a benevolent man, by human weakness and peril in its sorriest guise and direst strait, to help to make up to him for the sacrifice he was called on to offer; since the world had not gone well with Oliver Constable during these last years, and his own affairs required the unremitting attention which he saw himself compelled, and had pledged himself to Fan, to give to those of another.

Oliver had started on his mission impressed with the conviction that it behoved him especially to make his business prosper, or, if he could not do that, to prevent its becoming disastrous, in order to remove the slur thrown liberally on Jacks-of-all-trades, geniuses, and enthusiasts. He had not the slightest inclination to the modified martyrdom of commercial losses for their own sake. He decidedly objected to wasting the money which his father had carefully gathered that Oliver’s career as a gentleman and scholar might be untrammelled, even for a good object, if he could prevent it.

On the contrary, it was part of Oliver Constable’s duty, as he conceived it, to vindicate the truth that the best citizenship and the best Christianity did not, as a matter of course, conduct a diligent, prudent, and self-denying tradesman straight into the Bankruptcy Court.

But Oliver was fated to share the lot of most real reformers and pioneers of the highest civilisation—the only civilisation which is not merely skin-deep, but which, penetrating to the core, pervades the whole man, and by the grace of God never leaves him, only departing when he himself departs, to dwell with him in heavenly habitations—and of the righteous Gospel which the Lord of Righteousness delivered to be worked out—not in church or chapel wholly or even principally, but on such fields as the Rialto of Venice or the London Exchange, the shops of common tradesmen, the tables where feasts, great and small, are held, the hearths round which men and women meet to rest from the work of the day, and cheer their souls.

But Oliver had to discover for himself, in more ways than one, the pithiness of the proverb that to give a dog an ‘ill name’ is to hang him, that to run a-muck against popular prejudices is to suffer injury more or less severe, and wait long for any shadow of a reward.

He had no manner of doubt that the reward of disarming distrust and establishing a right to success would come in time, if the worker could but possess his soul in patience, and exercise sufficient faith, endurance, and bountiful liberality, if he could tarry and lay out, nothing doubting, fresh materials and pains.

Oliver’s fortitude was not exhausted, but he was sensible he had spent some of his funds freely, and would soon be living on the verge of his income, if he did not economise every fraction and dedicate it to its proper use.

The secession of Jim Hull, with the establishment of his nephew in fine new baking premises and a fine new business in the town, had diverted a large slice of the public confidence and custom from what were now held the _old_ Constable premises and business. The slice was always increasing in size, and diminishing the original _pièce de résistance_, from which it had been taken by the shrewdness which proved quite justified in the anticipation that the public would prefer apparent purity and actual adulteration, both in the produce of the mill and the bakehouse, to the uncorrupted but unbleached article.

There was the additional stimulus to the withdrawal of patronage of a strong spice of malicious satisfaction, not enough to form a conspiracy, but existing in sufficient abundance for lending countenance and support, whether sly or bold, to a rival business conducted on good old-fashioned, rational, give-and-take principles. Oliver Constable had come among the Friarton shopkeepers uttering high-flown heresy, witnessing in his conduct against time-honoured liberties of trade, and stirring up doubts in the bosoms of the very tradesmen—not to say of their customers. So the Dadd and Polley part of the community had no objection that Oliver should bear in his own person the brunt of his Quixotic ideas. Perhaps that would teach him to pay greater respect to their superior age and experience.

In short, Oliver’s business profits were diminishing so steadily as to threaten to make his mill and bakehouse eat their own heads, if he did not diminish in proportion the staffs of millers and bakers—a step which he objected to take so long as he could afford to hold out, since it would not only be tantamount to an admission that he was outmatched, he argued with himself, it would be hard upon the men who had submitted to his rules and consented to work on his terms—not that he had altogether overcome the workmen’s opposition. His reputation had gone abroad as a master full of new-fangled fancies and hobbies, therefore he had been exposed to the further disadvantage of possessing a succession of restless, suspicious servants, flighty on their own account, and inclined to perpetual experiments on, and changes of, employers.

Then Oliver had been of a mind to show that he would not neglect any lawful means of improving his flour and bread, so he had set about introducing expensive new machinery into the mill and bakehouse. But being, after all, a green hand, without his father’s practical experience in his double trade, the young man committed several astounding blunders in the adoption of the machinery, and was much out of pocket as a punishment for the errors of his ignorance. The result awoke no small amount of jeering, crowing, and laughter at the leading tea and supper tables of Friarton.

Oliver’s inner man had not fared better during these three harassing years. Fan’s house was not a second home to him. The sole effect, so far as he could see, of his striving to fraternise in the true sense with the Dadds and the Polleys was that he had succeeded in arousing in his father’s old allies a hostile and mocking temper, not pleasant to encounter. Since his quarrel with Jack Dadd, the old Dadds, who naturally took their son’s part, had fought shy of Oliver Constable; and he had also, in some manner, he could not for the life of him tell how, given serious offence to the whole Polley family. He supposed they were enlisted, with hot, resentful party spirit, or what they mistook for party spirit, on Jack Dadd’s side. Oliver was half right, half wrong. For he was incapable of perceiving the other and major ground of complaint which the Polleys had against him—because, after raising false expectations, he had stopped short of seeking to keep company either with ’Liza or one of her sisters, in the prospect of matrimony.

Mrs. Hilliard had never gone so far as to shut her door against Oliver Constable. Nay, she had been so candid as to admit with pleasure that her later prognostications with regard to him had been premature, and in the main erroneous. But Oliver’s chief inducement—as he had come to acknowledge to himself after there was no further need of crushing it down—for availing himself of the privilege of visiting at the Meadows, had vanished from the date of the terrible illness which had seized on Catherine Hilliard. It was one of the worst of those indefinite, incalculable, nervous illnesses, bred of the conditions of modern life, which have no beginning and no end, which baffle by their very intangibility and paralyse by their unrelaxing clutch, and one of whose horrors is that in their abnormal character they may develop symptoms piteously fantastic and grotesque, like the antics of madness. Such illnesses, dreaded not without cause, are apt, when they spare the wasted life, to reduce the patient to a state of unrelieved, permanent prostration and chronic invalidism, which is death in life.

Catherine Hilliard had drifted away from her friends on the misty, dreary sea of illness which had no shore, till she seemed lost to them here, till even to Oliver Constable—who now owned to himself, like the _Bursch_ in the famous _Burschenlied_, that he had loved her always and would love her throughout eternity—she survived chiefly as the aching, melancholy thought of the girl who had been capable of dreaming noble things, but who had not been able to grasp the truth that behind the commonest, even the most sordid, absolutely repulsive details of human life, there exist nobler things still than man or woman ever dreamt of in their highest philosophy.

And the brute creation, which Catherine Hilliard had so loved, preferring it to the human, drew dumbly and wistfully away from the decline of her humanity; while the book world in which she had elected to dwell, crumbled into dust around her. She had left books too behind her, and the beings that peopled her present existence were more visionary than the ghosts she had formerly chosen for her company.

Oliver could only look forward to her deliverance from this last bondage to the unreal, by her entrance on unsealed and everlasting verities.

Then it was when Oliver was most tempted to regard his enterprise as a wretched disappointment, he was called on to take up the burden of another man’s failure.