Chapter XXIX: Fresh Service

On the night of his return, Oliver had been tempted to say—

My wound is deep,
I fain would sleep,
Take thou the vanguard of the three;

but the next day found him again leading the van. Happy the wounded who have still strength for the fight, and whose presence is yet wanted in the thick of the fray.

Sally Pope arrived at an early hour the following morning, and gave her master her greeting. She was so full of self-reproach for her unlucky absence the previous evening that it diverted her in some degree from the loud condolences which he was only too content to be spared. And Sally was a shrewd woman; she knew that ‘men-folk do not care to return to the topic of their grief, as poor critters of women will discuss it at large, and find comfort in dwelling on their trials;’ so when her single heartfelt lamentation for ‘poor Miss Fan as were that nimble and clever,’ had been made, Sally set herself to divert Oliver from the cold comfort of his lonely home-coming, by retailing to him all the latest news of Friarton.

‘Lord, Master Oliver, we’re not singular in our troubles! There’s young Dadd down with fever, lying between life and death. Not a critter will enter Dadd’s shop—not to say the house, and the old people are nigh besides themselves.’

‘Poor Jack! poor souls!’ said Oliver. ‘But what has become of the Sister—the wonderful nurse Mrs. Hilliard imported into the town?’

‘Oh! she’s gone these three months, the more reason that Miss Hilliard is as spry as any of the rest of the young ladies. But now, Master Oliver,’ broke off Sally, putting her head on one side and speaking deprecatingly, almost mincingly, ‘I know as great allowance ought to be made for idle ladies, and that they mun be left for to direct themselves in many ways not open to the commonality, else they’ll fall to pieces like a dry wash-tub, or go all over red rust like a flat-iron laid aside, and be in danger of slipping through their friends’ fingers like Miss Hilliard all but slipped, and gave no end of trouble, the silly thing! Still, Master Oliver, do you think it is proper for ladies, as are none so old or ill-favoured, to go and get rid of their spare time—and all time is to spare with them—a feeling of the pulses and looking at the tongues of sick carters and masons and their families, ay, and of tramps and their brats, a-treating of them to shooken’up pillows and cooling drinks, and as many blisters and draughts as they can set their minds to—save us?’

‘Well, Sally, at least you’ll allow it is a good chance for the masons and tramps,’ said Oliver with a laugh.

‘I dunno,’ Sally shook her head. ‘I think the world’s turned upside down. But leastways better such folly than that Miss ’Mily Polley’s been up to.’

‘What has Miss ’Mily been up to?’

‘Gone and lost her good name, which she’ll never pick up again—not though she were the queen on the throne, with armies and navies to scour the world in search of it, at her word. Now there’s nothing left Miss ’Mily save a patched-up marriage, to cover the disgrace as will not be covered, to a rolling stone of a ne’er-do-well that will bring her to want and misery. Her as was such a pert piece, setting herself up, picking holes in the coats of her betters, and giggling in her light-headedness at this body and that body, as if she herself were a non-such and could go her own road and fear no fall.’ Sally ended with the cruel relish with which the old, who ought to be, and who, let us be thankful, often are, the most charitable, still sometimes, alas! under provocation, contemplate their young neighbours’ receiving their deserts.

‘You must be mistaken, Sally,’ remonstrated Oliver, grieved and shocked. ‘It cannot be as you say. The Polleys have always been most respectable people. Even Polley, though a useless sinner, picked himself up, you know. You must have taken some coarse scandal for gospel. Mrs. Polley has been a good mother, and has looked well after her daughters.’

‘Excuse me, Master Oliver, but it’s much you know of it, sir,’ said Sally, half huffily, half scornfully. ‘And it is little thanks Mrs. Polley, poor woman, have got for her work in the shop and her rule of her family. She were a bit set up, in her own way, and vaunty of what she had done for them gals and that silly man of hers. Nobody came near herself, and nought that belonged to her was to be sneezed at. Ah! her mouth’s shut now, and she won’t hold up her head again, not by a long chalk, as she has done in Friarton. I am sorry for her though,’ reflected Sally, showing some signs of relenting, ‘for she were a through-going woman. Her took the whole load upon her own shoulders, when it fell off them sloping ones of Polley’s, and asked help from nobody. Hard she drudged a dozen years back, never sparing herself, to keep her family out of the gutter. It was ill-done of any one of them to humble her pride. But it’s the way of children—so it is. It’s a comfort to the likes of me, as is a single woman, alone in the world, except for a niece and neffy or two—looking after my savings I’ll be bound, Master Oliver—to think that I might have had a man and bairns to my share, and been no better—rather worse served. But I’ll fault Mrs. Polley with this’—Sally returned to the charge—‘she would do everything in the shop with her ten fingers. She would keep the management of the books and accounts in her own hands. Why, them gals weren’t properly brought up to the grocery business or to any other. They were as silly as silly could be, if you took them off weighing a pound of sugar, or cutting a bar of soap, as a child could do. Our Miss Fan could have bought them at the one end of the town and sold them at t’other. They went a deal of their time hand-idle, or falalling with their best clothes; and was that an up-bringing to keep them out of mischief? I have it on good authority, they would lay a-bed in the mornings, and they were out at their gadding every blessed evening, though she pulled them up tight about minding meals and hours, and shutting up to her face. If they were quick, they could get their heads out—most of all Miss ’Mily, as was the mother’s favourite—so it seems she had been drawing a score under her mother’s nose, and carrying on at a fine rate with that scamp of a half gentleman—a pretty gentleman! Mrs. Sam Cobbes’ Lon’on brother, though Mrs. Polley had forbidden her gal to have anything to say to him.’

‘I should think so,’ said Oliver, with decision. He knew the man—a fellow with a specious address, and the glamour of expectations from a rich uncle in the Customs, which served him as an apology for losing such mongrel situations as he occasionally condescended to fill, and for loafing away the greater portion of his days, hanging on to other and humbler relations than the autocrat in the Customs, the credulous Cobbes for instance, always in a lazy, often in a disreputable fashion. He was just the sort of acquaintance, full of false pretensions, vulgar smartness, and strongly-flavoured dash, to take the fancy of an ignorant, ill-brought-up, wilful girl like ’Mily Polley. And on the man’s side, he would not hesitate to amuse himself with her openly-expressed admiration, as the best joke going.

But Sally was eager to empty her budget. ‘Mrs. Polley she finds out that ’Mily is snapping her fingers in her mother’s face,’ the storyteller resumed the thread of her narrative, nothing loth, ‘and keeping company with Birt on the sly, continually: so the old woman’s temper, as is none of the coolest at the best of times, flies into a blaze, and she up and dares the gal to see the fellow again, or she will be turned to the door, as not worthy of such a home, and to serve as a warning to her sisters. Mrs. Polley, if you please, never lets ’Mily out of her sight from that moment, except at night, when the mother locks the gals’ room door on them, in their hearing.

‘Sure enough, it is no more use than locking the stable-door after the horse has got his head out of the halter, and kicked up his heels in giving the stable-boy the go-by. And the black affront before the rest of the family—certain to leak out too, with the feeling of a gaol, after the liberty the gal had snatched, in spite of Mrs. Policy’s tantrums, druv Miss ’Mily from bad to worse. She goes and throws dust into the eyes of them sillies of sisters, or else she scares them into telling no tales; she bribes the poor slavey of a maid. Any how, Master Oliver, she manages to give her mother the slip again, gets out of the house after it is shut up for the night, and runs and meets the scoundrel at the improperest hours. All is up with the foolish, wrong-headed lass’s good name then, Master Oliver, I need not go for to tell you. Mrs. Polley catches her youngest daughter a stealing in at the airy-door, under cloud of night, and thrusts her out with her own hand, raging that ’Mily is never to cross her mother’s honest threshold again. She will have nought more to say to the gal; she may go back to where she came from.

‘Them as told me,’ said Sally, after a pause to recover her breath in her unconscious dramatising of the miserable details, ‘maintained that Polley did interfere, and try to put in a word for his daughter; but, in course, his wife would not hear him, and it do stand to reason that he has been so poor a critter, he has lost all title to be listened to. The long and the short of it is, the talk was over the whole town the next morning. The Cobbes took ’Mily in—they could not do less—with Birt, who had got the gal into trouble, their brother; and ’Mily Polley is to be married, and go straight off to Lon’on, or Manchester, or Glasgow—one of them big towns—with her bargain next week. Folk think Sam Cobbe’s that ashamed, he has forked out the money—though he’s none so rich, and the coal and potato trade ain’t so flourishing—and has used all his influence to over-persuade Birt, by threatening to expose him to his uncle in the Customs, to make the gal the amends of marrying her against his will—the mean scuff.’

‘I am afraid it is a bad business,’ admitted Oliver sadly, compelled as he was to regard this lingering version, in a lower walk of life, of the wild, youthful escapades, and the half-brutal parental tyranny and violence which met the rebellion half way, that were to be found in every rank, before Christian civilisation did its work, a century and more ago. Now such evil tales were only possible among the desperately vicious of the highest, and the desperately ignorant of the lowest, ranks, or in the gross materialism and incapability of self-restraint which form the standing reproach and grievous disfigurement, to set against the many virtues of that large class of smaller shopkeepers—to raise whom in the scale of humanity Oliver Constable had been willing to devote his life.

Oliver went immediately to Friarton to look after his own business. It did not take him long to despatch what he had to do. He had only to receive the last report from the not greatly interested foreman. It was quite what Oliver had expected. He went through it in less than an hour. It took him no more than ten minutes afterwards to write out, in the back shop, his announcement of giving up his father’s and his own baking business—he could not pretend to sell the goodwill of what had ceased to pay its cost—to be inserted in the next week’s Friarton’s newspapers.

Oliver walked along the High Street afterwards, without happening to meet any save the most casual acquaintances. He passed the Polleys’ shop door, having a glimpse of Mrs. Polley with the purplish flush on her face to which she was liable, fixed in her cheeks, and a certain hard, set turn of the head and jerking activity of movement, as she served her customers. He knew that she would stand and do her work there, though the force she put on herself might involve the danger of her falling behind the counter. But he could not go in then, or for some time to come—not till the sough of the scandal in the family had so far died out, and the bitter mortification its head was experiencing, had partly worn off. Sympathy and condolence were not to be thought of here. They would be a positive insult.

But there was nothing to hinder Oliver from repairing to the Dadds’, forgetful of the coolness between him and Jack, or rather spurred on by it to the quicker exercise of old friendship.

Oliver found the shop much as it had been described by Sally Pope, forsaken by customers, abandoned to the disheartened journeymen and shop-boys, with the goods either unexposed for sale or lying about in a state of confusion and disorder, which marked the absence or indifference of the masters. For both the Dadds had taken pride in their well-filled, well-kept shop. Friarton was somewhat given to panics in case of dangerous infectious diseases. The undaunted Sister who had brought light above the horizon had not stayed long enough to convert the town to her view of illness.

Oliver had barely time to enquire for the patient, when old Dadd hurried out from the back shop and accosted him. It was a relief to distinguish the voice of an old friend who had come voluntarily into the shop and was standing quietly leaning against the counter, instead of fleeing from the place, as if it were a pest-house. It almost exhilarated the stout-hearted old man, who was keeping up bravely, to crack one of his old jokes.

‘Not come back yet a family man, Mr. Oliver? Not wholly without its advantage—I mean the bachelor state. Mind coming in farther? Bless you! _don’t_ you mind? It will do Mrs. Dadd a power of good to see a strange face—as ain’t really strange—quite the contrary, and ain’t the doctor’s or one of them dratted nurses—which they never keep their time nor do their dooty properly, as the poor fellow needing them knows to his cost. His mother can’t watch day and night for weeks, and I’m but a poor hand at the trade,’ said the father wistfully, ‘though I would give a deal to take it up off-hand. But, you see, it don’t come natural like to a man as it do to a woman, and I wasn’t bred to it, in any sort, being come of a healthy family,’ rambled the linen-draper, staving off questions, as Oliver suspected, till they were through the back shop, up the stair and into the vacant, dreary-looking best parlour, with its torn prescriptions cast heedlessly on the carpet and its tray of half-empty physic-bottles and slops put down recklessly on the edge of the table, where guests had been wont to see more substantial fare carefully deposited. Then old Dadd raised his fist and was about to bring it down on the table with a bang—which in the very act of being dealt, was caught up and so much suppressed that it barely caused the physic-bottles to jingle, because Jack’s bedroom lay no farther off than the other side of the passage. ‘Yes, sir, my boy Jack is swimming for his life, they tell me,’ said the poor man, winking his eyes, knitting his brows hard, and speaking as if Oliver were about to question the statement.

The door behind them opened, and the unnaturally pitched voice sank into silence abruptly, while the late speaker turned eagerly to meet the new comer.

Mrs. Dadd had thought Oliver was the doctor, and entered hastily. At the sudden sight of her son’s contemporary and old companion standing there in the flush of health and strength, she broke down, for a moment, more completely than Dadd had done, to his great dismay. For Mrs. Dadd was a mannerly woman—so far as she understood manners. She prided herself on being at home with sickness, and she was accustomed to say, she did not know what a woman was good for, unless it were to bear up on these occasions when a man was sure to give way. One gain that was got by her sinking into a chair and covering her face, in place of greeting Oliver, was that it roused old Dadd to bustle about in order to quiet her, and to seek to explain the strange state of matters to Oliver.

‘Now, don’t take on so, like a good soul; he ain’t worse since morning. No, I knew it. And don’t you go for to think, Mr. Oliver, it’s any ill feeling to you that’s sticking in the Missuss’s throat. Nothing of the kind, sir. Why, that was all out of head with poor Jack himself—who was never a chap to bear malice, months ago. He said to me only the other day when this illness was coming on him; “I can’t tell what ails me, father; it ain’t my head, or my back, or my legs in petickler—only I feel seedy all over. I ain’t fit for the shop, and I’m still less fit for a field-day”—you see the autumn manoeuvres was coming on—“if it had been a year or two back, I might have gone out to Friarton Mill and had a quiet afternoon with Constable, and tried what that would have done for me. Yes,” he said, “I remember there was bad blood between us; but I’m not so cock sure as I have been, that I had the best of it. Anyhow, Constable was the right sort to go to, at a pinch. You could look to be borne with, and set on your feet again when you felt you had not a leg left to stand on, as it is my bad luck to do to-day.”’

‘That was very good of Jack,’ said Oliver warmly. ‘Then you’ll let me sit up with him tonight, since he’ll not mind; perhaps he’ll rather like it. I don’t mean to boast of my qualifications as a nurse; but I think you and Mrs. Dadd may trust me to see to the doctor’s orders.’

‘I should think so, Mr. Oliver,’ said Dadd with emphasis. ‘You are kind, and we are much indebted to you, as we’ll tell you better some day, please God. Others has offered, but none so hearty, or whom we could put such faith in,’ old Dadd astonished Oliver by saying. ‘And as to Jack’s minding or liking, bless you! he don’t know his own mother from a stranger, and hasn’t these three days back.’

‘It’s that as has made me useless, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Dadd, sitting up and apologising feebly; ‘so that I haven’t even had the grace to thank you for your offer.’

‘Never mind thanks,’ said Oliver. ‘Did my father go out of his way to thank you when you stayed at Friarton Mill and brought his little girl through her fever?’

‘Ah, that was different; that was all in a woman’s way for a motherless little thing, and I ran no risk, having had the scarlet fever myself when I was a child. I wish I had been with her at the last, poor soul! When her trouble came upon her, in a strange place, and none as she knew, save men to look after her, I reckon she would have cared then to see the face of an old acquaintance, as was a woman like herself and knew her needs. But the Lord will protect you, Mr. Oliver, as He may have raised you up, and sent you home, at this time, to save my dear Jack. May be it is the greatest mark of respect I could show you or any man, after all, to think of leaving my own lad in your care.’

Oliver did not know about having been raised up and sent home to save Jack Dadd, but he said ‘Surely,’ with fervour to Mrs. Dadd’s passionate amendment on her formal thanks.

So Oliver was regularly installed, with the doctor’s consent, night-nurse to Jack Dadd; and in place of calling at the Meadows, he went out of the way to avoid the house and any chance of encountering Mrs. Hilliard or her cousin, as he passed backwards and forwards between the rooms above the shop in the High Street, Friarton, and Friarton Mill for a considerable number of mornings and evenings. Such fellow-townsmen as he met contented themselves with looking curiously after him, whether they stopped him to enquire for the sick man, or whether they crossed the street to shun the lightest breath of infection. An odd fish, Oliver Constable, not without feeling—strange to say—in his queer composition.